Indian police were searching for 15 missing people yesterday after finding the bodies of a baby girl and a woman floating down river from a national park in Assam, where Muslim villagers were killed in a massacre that has marred the country’s general election.
India is in the home stretch of a five-week election, which has heightened ethnic and religious tensions in some parts of the country and which the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) looks set to emerge as the winner.
The worst violence was in the northeastern state of Assam, where at least 36 people were killed by suspected militants belonging to the Bodo tribe in three massacres last week, believed to be revenge attacks after Muslims voted against the Bodo candidate.
Photo: AFP
The brunt of the killing was in the village of Narayanguri on the banks of the Beki river and the fringes of the Manas national park, where masked gunmen burned dozens of houses and shot more than 20 men, women and children. Villagers there insist more people are missing.
“We have deployed SDRF [State Disaster Response Team] to search in the Beki river for those missing people,” Assam Additional Director-General of Police A.P. Rout told reporters.
He said villagers and police had found the remains of a six-month-old child and a 35-year-old woman named Jahanara Begum, both floating in the river about 25km from the site of the massacre that took place on Friday last week.
The Hindu nationalist BJP has condemned the killings and accused the Congress Party, which runs Assam and leads the national government, of not providing sufficient security in the volatile Bodo region, despite threats of violence.
However, the BJP’s candidate for prime minister, Narendra Modi, has ramped up verbal attacks on illegal immigration by Muslims from nearby Bangladesh, drawing criticism from his opponents that he is inflaming tensions.
A local court on Tuesday ordered police to detain 14 persons in their custody suspected of being involved in the killings. They include six forest department personnel, who villagers allege were involved in the attack.
The Manas park is a UNESCO World Heritage site that borders the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and is popular with Indian and foreign tourists drawn to its dense biodiversity and tigers.
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