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09/09/2008: "India: where Christians are a target for the religious murder mobs"

The mob appeared an hour after sunset, armed with axes, clubs and paraffin. The carnage that followed would have been much worse if the Christians of Gadragaon, a remote village in northeast India, had not been warned by text message: "The Hindus are coming to kill you."

The alert gave most enough time to flee to the jungle, where 114 of them would hide for a week, drinking rainwater and foraging for food.

But the warning did not come early enough for those unable to run. "They doused him with petrol and taunted him; we could hear him screaming," said Ravindra Nath Prahan, 45, of his paralysed brother, Rasananda, 35, who was burnt alive by Hindu fanatics. "I could have tried to save him. But we had to save ourselves."

The attack on Gadragaon, by a mob that chanted "Hail Mother India" as they razed the village, was among the first of the grim litany of atrocities committed against minority Christians in the state of Orissa over the past two weeks. The Vatican has called the wave of violence "a sin against God and humanity".

[ How much longer before people get the message that different cultures, ethnicities and religions need to be kept apart from one another, or chaos results sooner or later? ]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4687075.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093