india

Updated: Apr 11, 2020 13:19 IST

More than a hundred people violated Covid-19 lockdown orders and gathered to offer prayers at a mosque in Gopinathpur village in the Barwan police station area of Bengal’s Murshidabad district on Friday afternoon. A handful of policemen, headed by two officers, somehow managed to disperse the crowd.

This happened on a day when the state administration announced, for the first time, that it had identified around 10 coronavirus hotspots in the state where a complete lockdown has been ordered.

More than 170 people who attended the Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi’s Nizamuddin last month have been kept in quarantine at a location near Kolkata. Many of these are foreign nationals.

On Friday, the police received the information that more than 100 people had gathered for Friday namaz in Gopinathpur.

Sub-divisional police officer of Kandi, Kumar Sani Raj, and officer-in-charge of Barwan police station Nirmal Das rushed to the spot with a small force to vacate the mosque. Though the policemen did not encounter any physical resistance, people started arguing that they had the right to offer prayers. They demanded that the police must leave.

Locals told the police that in normal times not less than 300 people gather at the mosque on Fridays and the crowd was much less because of the lockdown. The police found that nobody at the mosque was wearing any mask.

Kumar Sani Raj said, “We got assistance from the Imam (main cleric) of the mosque. The people gathered out of sheer ignorance. We told them how deadly the virus is and how it spreads in the community.”

“The Imam also requested the villagers not to violate lockdown orders and not to come to the mosque till things are back to normal. He asked them to offer namaz at home,” said the SDPO.

The police also distributed rice, dal and vegetables among 140 poor families in the village.