Telangana police allegedly torture and kill man following facial recognition misidentification
A man in Telangana, India, was wrongly arrested after facial recognition technology misidentified him as a criminal. He was allegedly tortured in custody and later died from his injuries.
Records by entity: Telangana Police and Medak Police
Facial recognition misidentification led to the wrongful arrest, torture, and death of an innocent man in India.
Khadeer paid with his life because of a tech failure after he was wrongly identified because of his similarities with the suspect.
Key facts
- What
- A man in Telangana, India, was wrongly arrested after facial recognition technology misidentified him as a criminal.
- Incident date
- Feb 16, 2023
- Who
- Telangana Police and Medak Police
- Failure mode
- Brand & Safety Incident
- AI surface
- Computer Vision
- Severity
- Catastrophic
What happened
Mohd Khadeer, a daily wage laborer, was wrongly identified as a suspect in a chain snatching case via facial recognition and CCTV. He was arrested on January 29, 2023, and allegedly subjected to severe custodial torture by Medak police. Although released on February 3, he died on February 16 from injuries sustained during the assault.
What broke inside the model
The facial recognition app used by the police identified Khadeer based on a similarity match with a suspect, which was then treated as a positive identification. The system's failure to distinguish between similar facial features led to a false positive match.
What it cost
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/telangana-police-allegedly-torture-kill-manAI Failure Index. "Telangana police allegedly torture and kill man following facial recognition misidentification" (FI-0657). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/telangana-police-allegedly-torture-kill-man (indexed Jun 22, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0657. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
Realm watches the model's internal state for the signature of unsafe or off-brand generation and can block or reroute the output before it becomes public, in real time rather than after it has been screenshotted.