A 52-year-old Muslim man died this week after he was beaten with bricks and sticks by a mob in a village outside New Delhi in response to rumors that he had slaughtered a cow and eaten beef.
Murder charges have been filed against at least 10 people in connection with the attack on the man, Mohammad Ikhlaq, and his son Danish. The two were dragged out of their home in the village, Bisada, shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday, the police superintendent for the region, Sanjay Singh, said. The son, 20, was in critical condition.
The mob “dragged my father and brother out, pulling them by the hair,” said Shaista Ikhlaq, Mr. Ikhlaq’s daughter, who denied that the family had slaughtered a cow or had been eating beef. “My father’s head was smashed. His lips tore and his teeth were broken as they beat him with bricks and sticks.”
Hindus consider cows to be sacred, and it is illegal to slaughter the animals in Uttar Pradesh, the state where the attack took place.
At least two other Indian states have adopted or tightened bans on the slaughter and consumption of beef since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won parliamentary elections last year. A court in Jammu and Kashmir, where Muslims are a majority, recently ordered the authorities to strictly enforce a law that had been in place since the 1930s.
Superintendent Singh said Wednesday that before the attack, a resident of the village asked a priest to announce that a slaughtered cow had been found near an electrical transformer and to request that residents gather at a temple. The police said villagers had also used social media to assemble the crowd.
Shortly after about 100 men assembled there, someone in the crowd said Mr. Ikhlaq was responsible for the slaughter.
Ms. Ikhlaq said the mob tried to attack her and her mother before they turned to the men.
“What we want is justice,” she said. “This was preplanned. If they suspected we had slaughtered a cow, why did they not file a police complaint against us with the proof? We would have happily taken the punishment as laid out in the law. But who gave them the right to kill my father?”
Six men from the area, ages 22 to 25, have been arrested, and the police are seeking four others.
Meat found at the Ikhlaq family’s house has been sent to a laboratory for forensic testing, and the results are expected in about two weeks. The police did not search the area near the transformer.
“What we had in the fridge was mutton,” Ms. Ikhlaq said. “We did not even slaughter or make any offering this festival season. Not even a chicken, let alone a cow.” Muslims in India traditionally sacrifice goats or buffaloes for Eid al-Adha, which was celebrated last week.
There are only about 50 Muslim families in Bisada, which has a population of 20,000, and Mr. Ikhlaq’s family was the only one attacked.
Source: NYTimes