Features

Religious strife causes bloodshed in India

The Associated Press
Saturday March 02, 2002

AHMADABAD, India — Hindu attackers stalked Muslims in the streets and set fire to their homes and shops Friday, pushing the death toll in India’s worst religious violence in a decade past 300. 

Officials said Saturday that a Hindu mob torched the Muslim village of Sardarpura late Friday, killing at least 27 people trapped inside their homes. The killings took the death toll in three days of carnage to 322. 

Press Trust of India news agency said police fired bullets in the air to scare away the mob, which regrouped as soon as the police patrol left. The mob set houses and shops on fire using cooking gas bottles, police said. 

The bloodshed has been largely confined to the western state of Gujarat, and has not spread across this vast nation despite a call for a general strike by Hindu nationalists. 

Some 900 soldiers deployed in Ahmadabad, a city of 3.5 million, where young Hindu men brandished swords and sticks Friday in a second day of looting and attacks triggered by a fiery assault on a train by Muslims.