India charges Muslim leader with culpable homicide over virus surge

NEW DELHI • India has brought charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder against the chief of a Muslim seminary for holding a gathering last month that the authorities say led to a big jump in coronavirus infections, police said yesterday.

The headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat group in a cramped corner of Delhi was sealed, and thousands of followers, including some from Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, were quarantined after it emerged they had attended meetings there in mid-March.

Police had initially filed a case against Muhammad Saad Kandhalvi, the chief of the centre, for violating a ban on big gatherings but have now invoked the law against culpable homicide, a police spokesman said.

"Delhi police had filed a first information report earlier against the Tablighi chief, now Section 304 has been added," the officer said, referring to culpable homicide in the penal code, which carries a maximum punishment of a 10-year prison term.

A spokesman for the Tablighi Jamaat group, Mr Mujeeb-ur Rehman, said it did not have confirmed reports about the new charges. The Tablighi is one of the world's biggest Sunni Muslim proselytising organisations.

The authorities said at the beginning of the month that a third of the nearly 3,000 cases at that time were either people who attended the Tablighi gathering or those who were later exposed to them.

India's tally of infections has jumped to 12,456, including 423 deaths, as of yesterday. In the hot spot of Delhi, 1,080 of its 1,561 cases were linked to the group's gathering, according to the city government data on Wednesday.

The Tablighi administrators earlier said many of the followers who had visited its offices in a narrow, winding lane in Delhi's Nizamuddin quarter were stranded after the government declared a three-week lockdown, and the centre had to offer them shelter.

Critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government have cautioned against fanning communal tension by laying the blame for the spread of the virus on the group.

Officials have rejected suggestions they were unfairly targeting the Muslim community, but said they had to rebuke the group because it had behaved irresponsibly by ignoring social distancing rules.

The Tablighi was also linked to a surge of cases in Pakistan, where it cancelled a similar gathering, but only at the last minute when thousands had already arrived at the premises in Lahore.

A gathering organised by the group in Malaysia also led to a surge of cases there and in several other South-east Asian countries.

REUTERS