April 25 (UPI) — A 21-year-old man from Thailand streamed a video on Facebook Live of himself hanging his 11-month-old daughter. He later killed himself, police said Tuesday.
The Guardian reported two clips were accessible to users on his Facebook page for about 24 hours before being taken down Tuesday. The first video was viewed 112,000 times by midafternoon Tuesday and the second one had 258,000 views.
On Monday, Wuttisan Wongtalay killed his daughter and himself at an abandoned hotel in Phuket, a Thai island in the Andaman Sea, Thai police said. Officer Jullaus Suvannin told The Guardian that the man was “having paranoia about his wife leaving him and not loving him.”
In the video clip, the father ties a noose around his daughter’s neck and drops her from a rooftop. The child is crying briefly before he retrieves he body. His own death was not shown.
Relatives saw the footage and alerted police. Thailand’s ministry of digital economy contacted the social network on Tuesday afternoon.
“This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “There is absolutely no place for acts of this kind on Facebook and the footage has now been removed.”
The footage was also available on Google‘s YouTube, but the company took it down after the BBC alerted the company to its presence. By then, the video had been viewed 2,351 times.
A YouTube representative said: “YouTube has clear policies that outline what’s acceptable to post and we quickly remove videos that break our rules when they’re flagged.”
Last week, 37-year-old Steve W. Stephens posted a video on Facebook of himself killing a 74-year-old man on Easter Sunday on a street in east Cleveland. The video was on Facebook for nearly three hours before it was taken down.
Two days later, a nationwide search ended in Erie County, Pa., where state troopers trapped Stephens, who then fatally shot himself, police said.
After the incident, Facebook said it was reviewing how it monitors violent and objectionable material, including exploring artificial intelligence.
Facebook said it has thousands of people reviewing several million videos every week among its 1.86 billion monthly active users.
