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| Tuesday, 4 November 2003 |
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Three dead as cricket ignites Hindu-Muslim violence AHMEDABAD, India, Monday (AFP) Three people were killed and 35 injured in Hindu-Muslim violence set off by a dispute over a children's cricket match in the riot-torn western Indian state of Gujarat, officials said. The unrest broke out in Viramgam, 62 kilometers (38 miles) northwest of the commercial capital Ahmedabad, when Muslim boys were playing cricket and their ball strayed into a Hindu temple, officials said. "When they tried to get the ball, they were beaten up by Hindus after which there was heavy stone-pelting between the two communities," provincial Home Secretary K. Nityanandam told AFP. Rival crowds burned down several shops and traded potshots with guns and rocks until police opened fire to disperse the rioters, he said. Three people died from bullet wounds and 35 others were injured, eight of them from firing and the rest from stones, Nityanandam said. Nityanandam and K. Chakravarthy, the state's director general of police, both said it was unclear whether the bullets that killed the three protesters came from police or other rioters. Chakravarthy said Viramgam had returned to normal but that extra police were sent and a night curfew imposed as precautions. It was the deadliest incident in months in Gujarat, which last year saw India's worst communal riots in a decade. The violence broke out in February 2002 when a Muslim mob in the Gujarat town of Godhra torched a train carrying right-wing Hindu activists, killing 59 people. More than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the subsequent orgy of violence. The provincial government, led by India's ruling Hindu nationalists, was accused by rights groups of turning a blind or even sympathetic eye to the vigilante attacks against Muslims. |
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