A young man was hit and killed by a train in Pakistan while being filmed walking along the tracks for a TikTok stunt, police and rescue officials said Saturday (Jan 23).A 10-year-old girl who allegedly took part in a “blackout challenge” on the video-sharing network TikTok
The accident happened on Friday in the Shah Khalid neighbourhood of Rawalpindi city, near the capital Islamabad.
Mr Hamza Naveed, 18, was walking next to the tracks while a friend filmed him, Mr Raja Rafaqat Zaman, a spokesman for the local rescue agency, told AFP.
"The moving train hit him while he was posing for a video and walking on the railway track," Mr Zaman said.
Rescue workers rushed to the site, he said, but the young man was already dead. Friends of the young man told rescue workers he was posing for the video to post it on TikTok and his other social media accounts, Mr Zaman said.
A police official at the local station confirmed the accident and other details.Taking selfies and making videos for social media is wildly popular in Pakistan, as in other countries, with many youngsters using the posts to update their Facebook, Twitter and TikTok accounts.
Italian prosecutors have opened an inquiry into the accidental death of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly took part in a “blackout challenge” on the video-sharing network TikTok.
The girl died in a Palermo hospital after being discovered on Wednesday by her five-year-old sister with her cell phone, which was seized by police.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, said on Friday it had not managed to identify any content on its site that could have encouraged the girl to participate in any such challenge, but was helping the authorities in the probe over possible “incitement to suicide”.
“The safety of the TikTok community is our absolute priority, for this motive we do not allow any content that encourages, promotes or glorifies behaviour that could be dangerous,” a TikTok spokesman said.Medical experts have warned about the danger of the challenge being taken up by some young people, who refer to it as “scarfing”, or “the choking game”, in which restricted oxygen to the brain results in a high.
The girls’ parents told a newspaper another daughter explained that her sister “was playing the blackout game”.
“We didn’t know anything,” the girl’s father told the paper.
“We didn’t know she was participating in this game. We knew that (our daughter) went on TikTok for dances, to look at videos. How could I imagine this atrocity,” he said.
