NEW DELHI: A Muslim man has died after he was attacked by hundreds of Hindu vigilantes while transporting cows in India, police said Wednesday, amid rising tensions over the slaughter of the sacred animal.
Pehlu Khan, 55, died in hospital late Monday, two days after a mob attacked his cattle truck on a highway in Alwar in the western state of Rajasthan.
Cows are considered sacred in Hindu-majority India, and their slaughter is illegal in many states.
In parts of northern and western India, squads of vigilantes roam highways inspecting livestock trucks for any trace of the animal.
Alwar police chief Rahul Prakash said at least six others were injured in the attack, but had now been discharged from the hospital.
Police are still trying to identify the attackers and have filed a murder case, he said, adding that a postmortem would determine the cause of Khan’s death.
“We are yet to receive the postmortem report but he had multiple rib fractures,” he told AFP.
Prakash said the victim and his associates were returning to their home state of Haryana when the mob intercepted their vehicle.
At least 10 Muslim men have been killed in similar incidents across the country by Hindu mobs on suspicion of eating beef or smuggling cows in the last two years.
In 2015 a Muslim man was lynched by his neighbors over rumors that he had slaughtered a cow. Police later said the meat was mutton.
Critics say the vigilantes were emboldened by the election in 2014 of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
Last year Modi criticized the cow-protection vigilantes and urged a crackdown against groups using religion as a cover for committing crimes.
But last month, he appointed a right-wing Hindu priest to head the country’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, which is also home to much of the country’s meat industry.
Shortly after he was sworn in, police began shutting butcher shops, grinding much of the industry to a halt.
Muslim man dies after attack by cow vigilantes in India
Muslim man dies after attack by cow vigilantes in India
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More than 9,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across much of US
- “Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X
DALLAS: More than 9,000 flights across the US set to take off over the weekend have been canceled as a major storm expected to wreak havoc across much of the country threatens to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways.
Roughly 140 million people were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England.
The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.
Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight were moving toward the central part of the state on Saturday, the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said.
“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X.
Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 24 Celsius.
About 68,000 power outages were reported across the country at 8 a.m. ET, about 27,600 of them in Texas. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.
After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted.
Temperatures reached minus 34 C just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.
