India Jails 11 For Life Over Gujarat Massacre
MEP: A special court in India has sentenced 11 people to life in prison for their part in a massacre of mostly Muslim citizens during a 2002 mob riot in India’s Gujarat.
According to Reuters, the court also sentenced on Friday another 12 suspects to seven years in jail, over the murder of 69 Muslims, who were hacked and burnt to death in a residential complex in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, among them women and children.
Known as the Gulbarg Society killings, after the compound of bungalows where Muslims were living, the 2002 attack was called “the darkest day in the history of civil society” by the court.
More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the riots, sparked by a fire on a train that killed 60 Hindu pilgrims.
Critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the state chief minister at the time, say he did little to stop the riots.
Zakia Jafri, whose husband was killed in the massacre and who has campaigned for those responsible to be brought to justice, said “the sentences were too lenient”.
“After all the horrible things they did to so many people, they still gave such flimsy sentences,” Jaffri told reporters.
Hindu and Muslim relations in the south Asian subcontinent have long been strained, particularly since the partition of India into Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1947 by the British.
