Taj Mahal closed after Muslim riot

In article om,
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source:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...7-2703,00.html

Thousands of tourists were being evacuated from the famed Taj Mahal
city of Agra yesterday after angry mobs set fire to shops and cars and
attacked police in protest at the death of four Muslims in a traffic
accident.

A total curfew clamped by authorities on the city of 1.6million
people, 200km northwest of Delhi, failed to halt the rioting in which
at least one person has been killed, more than 50 have been injured,
and millions of rupees of damage has been caused.

Scores of cars and trucks were destroyed in the rampage, and five
local factories, including a soft-drink bottling plant, were
ransacked, looted and set on fire.

Terrified tourists were ordered to stay in their hotels, and the Taj
Mahal, India's top tourist attraction, which attracts more than 20,000
visitors a day, was briefly closed and surrounded by armed police.

By late yesterday, the curfew had been restricted to just six suburbs
and the Taj Mahal was reopened for tourists.

A senior police official in the city, which remained shrouded in a
heavy pall of black smoke from fires caused by the rioting, described
the situation as "still very tense" and tourists were being provided
with armed guards as they drove along the Agra to New Delhi highway.

The violence erupted after a speeding truck killed four Muslims as
they were riding home on a motor cycle after observing Shabb-e-Barat,
a holy "night of salvation" festival held 15 days before the start of
Ramadan.

The four were relatives of a prominent local MP in the state of Uttar
Pradesh, and rampaging mobs, most of them believed to be Muslim, soon
poured onto the main Agra-New Delhi highway, blocking it and doing
battle with police and rival gangs from the majority Hindu community.

"The cause of this violence was that traffic was not regulated
properly. Trucks were allowed into a no-entry zone meant for
pedestrians who were going for the Shab-e-Barat procession," state
government spokesman J.N. Chamber said yesterday.

On the streets leading to the Taj Mahal, police fired volleys of tear
gas in a vain attempt to disperse the mobs, but came under sustained
attack from stone and bottle-throwers.

Eventually, they were forced to fire live rounds of ammunition in the
air.

Many of those injured in the rioting were police, and the child who
died is said to have been hit by a stray police bullet.

About 20 per cent of Agra's residents are Muslim, the rest mainly
Hindu.

The national newspaper The Pioneer described the scenes in Agra as "an
orgy of pre-planned violence" in which Hindus were being attacked.

"If the accident (involving the four Muslim men) had not occurred, the
mobs would have manufactured some other reason," it claimed in an
editorial.

Meanwhile, in another manifestation of communal strife last night, the
controversial chief minister of the state of Gujarat, Hindu
nationalist hardliner Narendra Modi, was at the centre of charges that
a Muslim man had been seriously bashed by security guards after he
walked in front of the chief minister's convoy of cars. Mr Modi is a
hate figure to many Muslims.

The 22-year-old Muslim man was reported to have been "mercilessly
thrashed" by police after disrupting the convoy of cars carrying the
chief minister.

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