Hong Kong Police For The Creator Of Facebook Suicide Group

Police are seeking the person behind a Facebook group that encouraged teenagers to commit mass suicide, a report said yesterday, after a 15-year-old member tried to kill himself.
Nearly 190 people have joined the “I Have To Practise Suicide” group, which called on members to take their own lives on Dec 21, South China Morning Post reported. However, the site’s unknown creator had also posted a message on the social networking site saying that the group was just an “inside joke”, the Post said. Members were supposed to talk about ways to die in a “retarded way”, such as “jumping off a chair”, the creator wrote, adding: “I’m not encouraging suicide. It’s supposed to be an inside joke.” The site was removed from Facebook when local media reported the story.
Police launched their investigation after classmates stopped a teenage boy who belonged to the group from throwing himself off the roof of their school two weeks ago in Tin Shui Wai. The working class neighbourhood in the city of seven million has been nicknamed “City of Sadness” because of its social and domestic violence problems. Last year, a mother and her two young children died in a grisly murder-suicide in their Tin Shui Wai home.
According to messages on the page reported by the Post, many members were dead serious as they talked about the possibility of group suicide. “Does anyone want to commit suicide together?” asked one member who said he had failed to kill himself by taking two bottles of sleeping pills. “Burning charcoal and taking pills is what I want to do to kill myself,” the 18-year-old said, adding that he suffered from hyperactivity.
Chow Kam Pui, associate director of the Centre for Information Security and Cryptography of the University of Hong Kong, said police can trace the group’s members through the Facebook administration and Internet service providers in Hong Kong.
Members could also be found and identified by an analysis of their social networks and messages they posted in the group. Anyone who helps in or abets a suicide or attempted suicide faces a maximum penalty of 14 years’ jail, the Post noted. Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention director Paul Yip said suicide groups are “very dangerous”. “One person who has suicidal thoughts will pass them on to another and while one person may not have the determination to do it, with more people’s involvement, the determination will grow.”
Internet-related suicide pacts have also been reported in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia, Norway, Britain, Canada, the United States and Sweden.

Via The Straits Times through techxav