The crowd takes Abdullah’s body

The crowd takes Abdullah’s body in the aftermath of his death, transforming a police attempt to control the body into a wider confrontation. Lin makes his way toward the Crawford Market police station hoping to see Abdullah, but the crowd has already taken him. The episode’s decisive outcome is both intimate and public: Lin is denied the confirmation he seeks, while Abdullah’s death becomes a focus for grievances that extend beyond mourning.

Cause and immediate context

The sequence begins with the police trying to take Abdullah’s body to a hospital in a van. A large, distressed crowd attacks the vehicle and forces it off the road; the police then take the body to the Crawford Market police station. The crowd follows, shouting abuse. The effort to transfer the body therefore does not settle the situation: it shifts the confrontation to the station, where the police hold the body and the crowd gathers outside.

The people assembled are not presented as mourners alone. As Lin approaches, he understands that Abdullah’s death has intensified long-standing discontent among poor people in the neglected area around the market. The crowd includes many Muslims, and the surrounding noise consists of varied complaints, slogans, and prayers rather than a single organized message. The scene connects grief over one man’s death with grievances that have accumulated across a community, without suggesting that every person present shares one cause or purpose.

Lin’s attempt to reach the station

Lin rides toward the police station, but the crowd blocks the road and forces him to abandon his bicycle. On foot, he is caught in the moving mass. His progress is uncertain: the crowd carries him sideways, forward, and backward, so that reaching the station requires repeated effort rather than a direct approach. The description gives the journey a physical rhythm, but its central fact is that Lin must struggle through a gathering already beyond his control.

When he finally sees the station, police wearing helmets and carrying shields are arranged several rows deep across its frontage. The line makes clear that the authorities are trying to hold the building against the crowd. Lin’s purpose, however, is not to join the unrest or to confront the police. He wants to see Abdullah’s body and is still entertaining the possibility that Abdullah might be alive. That hope gives the journey its private urgency, sharply contrasting with the crowd’s many public demands.

The body is taken

After Lin and Khaled leave the immediate crush, Khaled tells him that Abdullah’s body is no longer at the station. The crowd had stormed the building before they arrived. The police pushed the people out, but the crowd then reached the cell where the body had been placed. The prisoners were released, and the crowd took Abdullah’s body with them.

This account establishes what happened inside the station while leaving the body’s destination unknown. The crowd’s actions are not simply an attempt to gain access: they breach the police-controlled space, free its prisoners, and remove the person whose death had drawn people there. The police regain the building, but not the body. For Lin, the result is not a discovery at the end of his journey but a more painful absence: he has reached the station too late to see Abdullah.

Lin’s grief and the unresolved aftermath

Khaled wipes Lin’s face with a handkerchief after the struggle through the crowd. Lin has been struck, but says he did not feel the blows; the pain he registers is emotional, near his heart. The contrast distinguishes the immediate force of the unrest from the loss that drives him. His body has passed through the crowd, yet his attention remains fixed on the absent Abdullah.

The disappearance also has a practical consequence: there is no body for a funeral. Later, Lin explicitly recalls that Abdullah’s body vanished during the riot and that there was nothing for the group to bury. The account compares this disappearance with that of Maurizio’s body, but does not resolve either absence. Abdullah’s removal is thus not followed by a recovered body or a settled public farewell; it leaves Lin and those close to Abdullah with grief complicated by uncertainty.

Narrative significance

The episode moves from a specific attempt to transport a body, to a police station under pressure, to a crowd whose demands exceed the immediate occasion, and finally to Lin’s private bereavement. That widening and narrowing pattern prevents the event from becoming only a report of disorder. The gathering has a collective history of grievance, while Lin’s attention is concentrated on one person and one unanswered need: to see Abdullah.

The crowd’s seizure of the body also reverses the apparent balance of control. The police choose the destination and place the body in a cell, but the crowd breaches the station, frees prisoners, and carries Abdullah away. The narrative does not specify where they take him or what happens to him afterward. Instead, the missing body becomes the event’s lasting fact, separating death from the rituals that might otherwise confirm and mark it. Soon after, Lin leaves the mourning community following Prabaker’s funeral and rides to Dongri to seek answers from Abdel Khader Khan. The movement from an unburied friend to a search for answers carries the unresolved loss forward into the next stage of Lin’s story.