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Hundreds of people were crammed into the group’s building until the weekend when authorities began taking them out for testing. More buses arrived on Tuesday to take them away to quarantine centers in another part of the city.

“It looks like social distancing and quarantine protocols were not practiced here,” the city administration said in a statement.

“The administrators violated these conditions and several cases of corona positive patients have been found… By this gross act of negligence many lives have been endangered… This is nothing but a criminal act.”

Authorities are trying to trace the movements of the Tablighi members after the meetings in Delhi and the people who were exposed to them.

Media said there were also Tablighi members from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and Saudi Arabia. The director general of Malaysia’s health ministry told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur that they were investigating the presence of Malaysians at the Delhi meeting.

“Obviously there is a high risk if they attended the (Delhi) gathering,” Noor Hisham Abdullah said.

India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion, is under a 21-day lockdown that will end in mid-April to try to stem the spread of the coronavirus but tens of thousands of out-of-work migrants are fleeing to the countryside, undermining the restrictions.

Musharraf Ali, one of the administrators of the Tablighi center in Delhi, said the group had been seeking help from police and the city administration to deal with people streaming in. But the lockdown had made things more difficult.