At least 11 die in religious clashes in India
By Thomas Kutty Abraham
AHMEDABAD, India, March 31 (Reuters) - At least 11 people were killed and several injured in fresh Hindu-Muslim clashes in India's riot-torn Gujarat and neighbouring Maharashtra state, police said on Sunday.
"Two people died in police firing and one due to injuries from a sharp weapon at Gomtipur area of Ahmedabad city early on Sunday," a senior police official said.
The official said police opened fire to disperse a large group of Hindus and Muslims who pelted stones at each other in the area. Twelve people, including two police officials, were injured.
Police said a curfew had been imposed in Gomtipur and army and paramilitary forces were patrolling the streets.
They said three people were killed later in another religious clash in Kambhat, a small town in Gujarat's Anand district, about 80 kms from Ahmedabad, the state's main city. Hindu mobs also burnt several shops belonging to Muslims in Baroda district on Sunday, police said.
Police opened fire to disperse the rioting crowd but there were no reports of casualty.
State officials said police have been asked to make preventive arrests to avoid fresh outbreak of violence.
"We want to end this violence completely. District officials have been told to firmly deal with people indulging in rioting and arson," Ashok Narayan, Gujarat's Additional Home Secretary, told Reuters.
Narayan said Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee would visit Gujarat on Thursday, his first to the state since the religious riots erupted last month.
Vajpayee will also discuss with state officials the speedy rehabilitation of nearly 100,000 people, mostly Muslims, living in relief camps.
In neighbouring Maharashtra state, four people died and 11 were wounded on Saturday after police opened fire to halt clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Akola, 600 km (380 miles) east of India's financial capital, Bombay, police said.
A woman was stabbed to death in a separate incident.
"The town is now peaceful though it is under a curfew," an inspector in the police control room told Reuters.
The deaths were the first in Maharashtra stemming from religious clashes since the violence erupted last month in Gujarat where more than 750 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed.
The bloody reprisals started after a Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu activists and burned 58 people alive.
Tensions began mounting in Akola on Friday after youngsters celebrating Holi, the Hindu festival of colours, smeared coloured powder on the gates of a mosque.
On Saturday, Hindu and Muslim mobs fought pitched battles with stones and shops were burnt, the inspector said.
Since the violence broke out in Gujarat, Maharashtra police have been on alert as the state experienced some of India's worst religious clashes when Hindu zealots razed a mosque in the holy town of Ayodhya in 1992.
10:14 03-31-02
Copyright 2002 Reuters Limited. |
