Odisha police sound Blue Whale Challenge alert

Bhubaneswar: Amid reports about a Class X girl allegedly committing suicide after taking the Blue Whale Challenge in Dhanakauda of Sambalpur district, DGP KB Singh on Thursday issued a letter to top police officers of the state directing them to take steps to remove the game link from social media.
“It is understood that an administrator of the game uses social media platform to invite/incite children to play the game, which may eventually lead to the extreme step for self-inflicting injuries, including suicide. You are requested to take steps to ensure that such link of this deadly game in its own name or any similar game is immediately removed from the social media platform,” DGP said in a letter to the SPs.
Blue Whale Challenge is reportedly a suicide game in which the player is given certain tasks to complete for a period of 50 days and the final task leads to the player committing suicide. The player is also asked to share photos after finishing each challenge.
Till now as many as 200 youngsters across the world have fallen prey to the game and killed themselves.
However, Sambalpur SP Sanjeev Arora ruled out the Blue Whale game angle in the death of the Class X student, identified as Suhani Rout.
“There is no report in that respect and we don’t know how a newspaper filed the article attributing the death to the Blue Whale game,” he said.
A day earlier, Suhani was found hanging in her house. The girl’s parents rushed her to a nearby hospital, where doctors declared her brought dead.
However, police have seized her mobile phone and sent it for verification.