The Washington Post
SARDARPURA, India — Carrying wooden sticks and plastic jugs of kerosene, a mob of 500 Hindus made no secret of their intentions as they swarmed into this tiny farming town late Friday night. "Kill the Muslims," they chanted. "Kill the Muslims."
Trying to flee but surrounded on all sides by the Hindu crowd, most of the town’s Muslims holed up in the one place they believed was safe: a one-room house with thick concrete walls and metal-barred windows at the end of their neighborhood.
But the throng soon followed them and encircled the house. "Get rid of the Muslims," some of the Hindus said, according to a Hindu man who witnessed the attack.
Panicked and crying, those inside the house begged for their lives. "We said, "Please forgive us. Please let us go,’ " said Ruksanabano Ibrahim, 20, who was packed inside with a dozen family members. "We kept saying, "We are not your enemies. What have we done to you?’ "
Then, just as it did moments earlier with shops, cars and other homes in the neighborhood, the mob doused cloth-wrapped sticks with kerosene, ignited them and hurled them through the windows. The terrorized occupants, who were locked inside the house, tried in vain to smother the flames with wool shawls and douse them with bottles of drinking water.
When police officers arrived half an hour later and broke open the door, 29 people were dead. Most of the 20 others in the house were seriously burned.
The gruesome attack was the latest in a wave of retaliatory killings by Hindus that have plunged India’s western Gujarat state into anarchy over the past three days, after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, who had been rallying to build a temple at the site of a destroyed mosque, was firebombed by Muslims on Wednesday, killing 58 people. The subsequent clashes, which have claimed more than 350 lives, are the most severe religious strife in India in almost a decade.
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