Muslim Area Attacked by Hindu Mobs; 158 Killed

Angry Hindus set fire to homes in a shantytown in western India’s Gujarat state today, killing at least 27 Muslims as they slept, police said. The blaze brought the death toll from a series of attacks to at least 158.

At least 76 people died in attacks Thursday when Hindu rioters stormed a Muslim neighborhood. Homes were set ablaze, and rioters kept firefighters away for hours. The attacks were launched in revenge for a Muslim assault on a train Wednesday.

In today’s attack in Narora, on the outskirts of Ahmadabad, about 300 Hindus set fire to a Muslim-dominated shantytown in an industrial area about 2 a.m., Deputy Police Commissioner P.B. Gondya said.

On Thursday, police had appeared outnumbered or unwilling to act to quell what appeared to be the worst rioting to hit the country in nearly a decade.

The officers stood in bunches, watching as groups of Hindus wielding iron rods and cans of gasoline or kerosene roamed Ahmadabad attacking Muslims in their homes, shops and vehicles.

Early today, the federal government sent nearly 1,000 soldiers to Ahmadabad, the main city in the area.

In Thursday’s worst attack, 38 people, including 12 children, died when about 2,000 Hindus set fire to six homes in an affluent Muslim neighborhood.

Trapped residents made frantic phone calls to police and firefighters. But police said they arrived two hours later, and firefighters were delayed more than six hours because of blockades by rioters.

A former lawmaker, Ehsan Jefri, fired at the rioters when they tried to enter his house, but he was dragged out and burned alive.

Elsewhere in Ahmadabad, rioters pulled a Muslim truck driver out of his vehicle and killed him at a roadblock, police said. Other Hindus made bonfires with goods looted from shops, and 20 men tore down a small mosque.

In a few instances, police opened fire on rioters, killing two and wounding six in Ahmadabad and two other towns, police said.

The violence came in retaliation for an attack Wednesday in Godhra, a town south of Ahmadabad, where Muslims set fire to a train carrying Hindu nationalists, killing at least 58 people.

Tensions have been growing between Muslims and Hindu nationalists who have been using the train to travel to and from Ayodhya, in northern India, where the World Hindu Council plans to start building a temple next month on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque.

The 1992 destruction of the mosque by Hindus sparked nationwide riots that killed 2,000 people. The government has called for calm, fearing bloodshed could spread quickly in this nation of more than 1 billion, where Hindu-Muslim fighting killed nearly a million people after independence in 1947. India is majority Hindu, but about 12% of its people are Muslim.

This week’s violence is believed to be the worst Hindu-Muslim fighting since 1993 riots in Bombay, also related to the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, killed at least 800 people.