Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Even wooden
doors and window frames have been
removed. The death toll here was however
low. According to Nathnagar circle officer
Mohammad Rahmatullah, 11 people lost
their lives at the hands of the mob which
had attacked the village. The reason for
relatively low toll was that most old men,
women and children had been evacuated
from Timoni on the night of October 25.
The villagers reportedly repulsed the
attack with the help of two licensed guns.
They knew that a bigger attack would be
mounted; so taking advantage of darkness,
women and children and old men were sent
to neighbouring villages/The few young men
left behind tried to repulse the attackers, but
were outnumbered. The attackers had quite
a few guns with them. The village was surrounded on three sides and when these
Muslims found resistance impossible, they
decided to run. The eight elderly people who
lost their lives had refused to move out the
night before thinking that the nearby Katerni
police station has been informed and the
police would do something to protect them.
They paid for their faith in the police with
their lives.
One can go on documenting the failure
of police to protect lives and properties of
Muslims in village after village. According
to a senior army official helping to maintain law and order in Bhagalpur, not more
than ten per cent of the Muslim households
in the villages falling in the ten-mile radius
of Bhagalpur could have remained untouched by the madness on the three days
following the first clash of October 24. So
extensive was the killing in the villages that
many bodies were buried, salt sprinkled over
them and after covering them with earth,
vegetables were grown to hide the killings.
Right upto the second week of January 1990
bodies were being fished out of the wells and
ponds in and around the town and the local
people maintain that many more lay buried
in the innocuous looking unharvested paddy
fields. And their apprehensions do not seem
to be wide off the mark if the digging out
of about 100 bodies from a cauliflower field
at Logain village is any indication. A top
district official who preferred anonymity,
said that he himself knew at least half of
dozen wells in the suburban areas of
Bhagalpur from where bodies were yet to be
fished out.
The grim tragedy of Bhagalpur and the
villages around owes much to the role of the
police on one hand, and some notorious
criminals, on the other. The people from
Madaninagar village believe that notorious
criminals like Mahaldar, Nanda Mandal,
Motriya Yadav and Tarini Mandal were used in looting and burning houses. These
criminals were also recently released on the
eve of the Lok Sabha elections. For three
days from October 24 to 27 organised
massacre, arson and looting continued by
crowds of people led by these criminals: The
rioters killed Muslim prostitutes from Jogarsar and Mansurganj mohallahs of Bhagal-