A man filmed himself killing his 11-month-old daughter on Facebook live before committing suicide, Thai police said Tuesday. The social media giant called the incident "appalling."
Authorities said the slaying occurred in the seaside town of Phuket, where the father, 21, hung his daughter. People could access the videos of the child's death for roughly 24 hours, until they were taken down about 5 p.m. in Bangkok (1000 GMT) on Tuesday, or about a day after they had been uploaded.
“This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim," a Facebook spokesperson said in an email to VOA. "There is absolutely no place for acts of this kind on Facebook and the footage has now been removed.”
Murders, suicides and sexual assault have plagued Facebook, though they make up only a small percentage of videos.
On Tuesday, a Swedish court jailed three men for the rape of a woman that was broadcast live on Facebook. And earlier this month, a man in the U.S. posted video on Facebook of himself killing a 74-year-old man in Cleveland, Ohio. The man accused of posting the video, Steve Stephens, shot himself after a police chase in Pennsylvania. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said afterward that the company would do all it could to "prevent tragedies like this from happening again."
Shocking footage
The harrowing footage from Thailand showed Wuttisan Wongtalay tying a rope to his daughter Natalie's neck before dropping the child, dressed in a bright pink dress, from the rooftop of a deserted building in Phuket.
Wuttisan's suicide was not broadcast, but his lifeless body was found beside his that of his daughter, said Jullaus Suvannin, the police officer in charge of the case.
"He was having paranoia about his wife leaving him and not loving him," Jullaus said.
Wuttisan's wife, Jiranuch Triratana, said she had lived with him for over a year. At first the relationship had gone well, she said, but then he grew violent and sometimes hit her 5-year-old son from a previous husband.
She feared that something was wrong on Tuesday when she found he had left home with Natalie.
Somsak Khaosuwan, a spokesman for Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy, said it contacted Facebook on Tuesday afternoon about removing the videos, after receiving a police request.
Khaosuwan said the government would take no action against the company: "We will not be able to press charges against Facebook, because Facebook is the service provider and they acted according to their protocol when we sent our request. They cooperated very well."
Some information for this report came from Reuters.
