By IINA
Jeddah: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has condemned the attacks on Muslims in which 32 were killed, including women and children, in the Indian state of Assam.
OIC Secretary-General Iyad Ameen Madani has expressed concern at local media reports of hundreds of Muslim villagers fleeing their homes with belongings on pushcarts as a result of the violence. He said that these attacks are criminal acts of brutality against innocent civilians.
Madani urged authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice and supported their efforts to bring rule of law to the areas affected by violence. Police arrested 22 people after authorities called in the army and imposed an indefinite curfew.
A state minister for border areas, Siddique Ahmed, said after visiting the affected areas that his government and the ruling Congress party had failed to protect the victims, who included at least eight women and as many children. “Even two-year-old children who could barely walk have been shot dead. I have never witnessed such scenes in my life,” he told reporters.
Meanwhile, Indian police searched for 15 missing people on Wednesday after finding 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 biggest group. 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.
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,” A. P. Rout, Assam’s Additional Director General of Police said. He said villagers and police had found the remains of a six-month-old child and a 35-year-old woman called Jahanara Begum, both floating in the river about 25 km from the site of the massacre that took place on May 2.
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. But 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.