Author: PTI
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: September 16, 2003
URL: http://us.rediff.com/news/2003/sep/16godhra.htm
A woman on Tuesday alleged before
the two-member Nanavati Commission that an armed mob of Muslims, led by
a Congress councillor, attacked Hindus in Bapunagar area in Ahmedabad during
the post-Godhra riots.
"On the day of the VHP-sponsored
bandh, armed Muslim men had stormed our locality and some of them even
stripped and said: Kill the Hindu eunuchs. Send your mothers and sisters,"
Sudha Patel, a resident of Patelnagar, told the panel probing the post-Godhra
violence in Gujarat.
"They gorged the eyes of a youth
with swords and repeatedly crushed him under their truck till he died,
they then stripped and made obscene gestures at Hindus," she alleged.
Patel told Justice G T Nanavati
(retd) and Justice K G Shah (retd) that though all persons in the mob had
masked their faces, she managed to recognise the councillor, Taufeeq Khan
Pathan, and his son, Zulfi, on March one.
She alleged that the mob beheaded
a local mendicant, who tried to pacify them, in front of her. "They later
hung his head displaying it to the locals, saying: We have chopped off
your mendicant," she alleged.
She said terror still reigns in
the minds of children in Patelnagar and sought protection from anti- social
elements.
Two other majority community members
alleged that Muslims of the area were trying to purchase their properties.
"I had to sell my house on two occasions," one Mulji Patel told the commission.
