Man Tied to Hindu Vigilante Group Among 5 Held in Deaths of 2 Muslims
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Version 0 of 1. NEW DELHI — A member of a Hindu vigilante group organized to protect cows was among five men arrested on Saturday in connection with the murder of two Muslim cattle traders, who were beaten and then hanged from a tree, the police said. The two victims were leading oxen to be sold at an animal fair before dawn on Friday when they were spotted by Awadhesh Sahu, a Hindu man, said Purushottam Singh, a police officer in Latehar, a district in the eastern India state of Jharkhand. Mr. Sahu said he believed that the two were leading the animals to slaughter and summoned seven friends to intercept them on the highway. The group surrounded the cattle traders, Mohammad Majloom Ansari, 32, and Mohammad Ibrahim Ansari, 13, took them into the forest and beat them, in an assault that lasted about 90 minutes, Mr. Singh said. The police were cautious about identifying a motive in the killings, noting that members of the same vigilante group confessed to extorting money from Muslim cattle traders on at least three earlier occasions. Mr. Singh also noted that one of the assailants had a personal grudge against the family of at least one of the victims. But elements of the case were reminiscent of a killing that occurred in September, when vigilantes from Save the Cow, a Hindu activist group, gathered a mob of about 1,000 people and lynched a Muslim man who was rumored to have slaughtered a cow. That case drew international attention, in part because members of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party condemned the police for filing murder charges, and because Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared hesitant to publicly condemn the violence. The five detained suspects have confessed to the crime, the police said, and three other people are being sought by the police. Among the men still being sought, Mr. Singh said, is one who made inflammatory statements and “whipped up the passion of the remaining seven” so that “they could not control their emotions.” The men arrested in connection with the killings include a farmer, a clerk, the owner of a cement shop and the owner of a small school. Mr. Singh said previous threats by the Hindu group ended once Muslims singled out for intimidation paid money to the group’s members, “but this time, their passions flared” and “they killed them.” “At this point, we can confirm that at least one of them is a member of a cow vigilante group,” Mr. Singh said. |