Fresh horror in India as three are killed trying to protect a young woman from harassment

 

Violent riots has killed 19 people in northern India after Hindu and Muslim groups turned on each other with guns and knives to settle a street brawl.




The riots were sparked by the killings of three villagers who had stepped in to defend a young woman being harrassed in Kawal, Uttar Pradesh state last week.

Anger has brewed in the area since the incident, but the violence turned deadly on Sunday when a journalist, a police photographer and several villagers die as a result of the violence.

Over a dozen people died from their injuries received during Saturday's clashes in Muzaffarnagar district, after which the violence spread to several neighbouring villages.

The Government has responded by deploying  hundreds of troops to quell the riots and search the area for weapons, while a state of high alert has been declared for Uttar Pradesh, an area home to 200 million people.

'A curfew has been imposed in three riot-hit areas of Muzaffarnagar,' said the head of the state's home ministry, R.M. Srivastava.



'The situation is still very tense, but under control'

Violence broke out Saturday afternoon after thousands of Hindu farmers held a meeting in Kawal village to demand justice in the August 27 killing of three men who had spoken out when a woman was being verbally harassed.

The state's minority welfare minister, Mohammad Azam Khan, said attendees had been giving speeches calling for Muslims to be killed in response to the death of the three villagers.

The farmers were set upon as they were returning home after the meeting, senior police official Arun Kumar said, adding that the assailants appeared to have planned their attack as they were armed with 'rifles and sharp-edged weapons.'

Gunfire was reported from several areas of the village. Within hours clashes broke out in neighboring villages, Kumar said.

Indian broadcast journalist Rajesh Verma of news channel IBN 7 was shot in the chest while covering a communal demonstration in Abupura, and died at the scene.

Uttar Pradesh was at the heart of some of India's worst communal clashes in December 1992, after a Hindu mob razed the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

The government has warned that India is seeing a rise in communal violence, with 451 incidents reported already this year, compared with 410 for all of 2012.

In August alone, communal violence killed two and injured 22 in a village in Bihar state, east of Uttar Pradesh, according to Indian media. Outbreaks have also been reported recently in Uttar Pradesh's district of Shamli, as well as in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.