Eight people have been killed in various mob lynchings over the last week in Bangladesh, AFP reported on Wednesday. The police said they were killed due to rumours that they were kidnapping children to offer them as human sacrifice for the construction of a bridge. More than 30 people have been attacked in similar cases.

The mobs targeted them after rumours on social media claimed that human heads were needed as sacrifices for the project. The bridge, which is expected to be the longest in Bangladesh, is being built over the Padma river, a tributary of the Ganges.

“We have analysed every single case of these eight killings,” Inspector General of Police Javed Patwary said in Dhaka. “Those who were killed by lynching mobs – no one was a child kidnapper.” So far, 103 people have been arrested in 31 cases filed in connection with these incidents, Patwary said, according to The Dhaka Tribune.

At least 25 YouTube channels, 60 Facebook pages and 10 websites have been shut down after the police began to crack down on these rumours, Patwary said. However, reports claimed that several posts on Facebook still spread these rumours.

The rumours reportedly began circulating after a man was seen carrying the severed head of a child in Netrokona district in north Bangladesh. A mob beat him to death on July 18.

The latest victims included a woman and a hearing-impaired man, who were both lynched on Saturday. Taslima Begum, a single mother of two, was lynched in front of a school in Dhaka on suspicions that she was a kidnapper, while the hearing-impaired man was beaten to death outside Dhaka when he was trying to visit his daughter.

Eight people were arrested for Begum’s murder and five were detained for spreading rumours, the police said.