India death toll rises to at least 38 in Assam violence
Thursday, 26 July 2012 04:39
The number of people killed in ethnic violence in India's Assam state has risen to at least 38, authorities say.
More than 170,000 people have fled their homes after fighting between indigenous Bodo tribes and Muslim settlers in Kokrajhar and Chirang.
Security forces have been given shoot-on-sight orders and a curfew has been imposed in the troubled areas,
There have been tensions between indigenous groups and Muslim Bengali migrants in Assam for many years.
Assam's chief minister Tarun Gogoi was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying that the bodies of 12 people killed overnight had been recovered from rice fields and roadsides.
'Tense'
"The situation is tense and we have a massive deployment of army, police, and paramilitary troopers," he said.
Rioters continued sporadic attacks, ripping apart homes and setting them on fire, according to reports.
Meanwhile, police in the Chirang district said they were having trouble imposing the curfew.
Railway links between Assam and the rest of the country have been disrupted after local people threw stones at an express train travelling through the area, and damaged four coaches, reports say.
A local villager fleeing the violence told local TV channels that people had "lost everything in the violence".
"Our houses have all been razed to the ground with mobs setting ablaze our properties," Rabiul Islam from Kokrajhar district said.
Police say that the clashes began when unidentified men killed four youths on Friday night in Kokrajhar district, an area dominated by the Bodo tribe.
They say that armed Bodos attacked Muslims in retaliation, suspecting they were behind the killings.
Soon afterwards unidentified groups set houses, schools, and vehicles ablaze, police said, firing indiscriminately from automatic weapons in populated areas.