CHANDIGARH, India - A Hindu mob torched Muslim mosques and shops in northern India Sunday amid continuing violence in the country's western Gujarat province.
Police in the northern state of Haryana said about 300 people surrounded the house of a Muslim family following rumors it had slaughtered a cow, an animal Hindus regard as sacred.
Not finding the family at home, the mob torched two nearby mosques and three Muslim shops, an official in the police control room in Luharu town of Haryana's Bhiwani district said.
"The situation is now under control and there was no loss of life," Rajpal Singh, Bhiwani's senior superintendent of police, told Reuters.
Police said they did not find any evidence of an animal's slaughter at the site and the rumor appeared aimed at stirring trouble in the town, some 250 km (156 miles) south of Chandigarh, Haryana's capital city.
A police official said the stone mosques were partially burned but not completely destroyed.
India, an officially secular nation, has been badly shaken by a wave of religious bloodletting that began with the death of 58 people who were killed when a train carrying Hindu devotees was torched by a Muslim mob in Gujarat last month.
Over 700 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed in reprisals across the state triggered by the train attack.
GUJARAT SIMMERS
In Gujarat, which in the past three weeks has been home to India's worst communal violence in a decade, police reported scattered incidents of looting and violence. One person was killed Sunday evening when police fired on a mob setting fire to a factory at Chandola, about 12 miles from Ahmedabad, the state's main city.
P.C. Pande, Ahmedabad's police commissioner told Reuters that arsonists set fire to a room inside another factory in the Madhavpura area of the city.
Police have imposed a curfew until Monday morning in five areas of Ahmedabad, Pande said.
The Press Trust of India news agency said two people were stabbed to death in the state's Baroda district and added that several incidents of stone-throwing and arson were reported from many parts of the state.
The latest upsurge in tensions comes against the backdrop of a stepped up drive by hardline Hindu groups to build a temple on a disputed site in the northern town of Ayodhya where a mosque was razed a decade ago.
Hardline Hindus believe Hindu god-king Rama was born on the site of the mosque and want to rebuild a temple dedicated to him that they say was destroyed by Muslim invaders in the 16th century.
Saturday, some 500 Hindu hard-liners ransacked the legislature in India's eastern state of Orissa, breaking windows and damaging furniture, to press their demand for building the temple in Ayodhya.