Virus Outbreak: Muslim leader gets homicide charge for virus surge in India

Reuters, NEW DELHI





India has brought charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder against the head of a Muslim seminary for holding a gathering last month that authorities said led to a big jump in COVID-19 infections, police said yesterday.

The headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat group in New Delhi has been sealed and thousands of followers — including some from Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh — have been placed in quarantine after it emerged that they attended meetings there in the middle of last month.

Police initially filed a case against Tablighi Jamaat head Muhammad Saad Kandhalvi for breaching a ban on large gatherings, but have now invoked a law against culpable homicide, a police spokesman said.

Worshipers leave after attending a three-day annual Muslim gathering held by the Tablighi Jamaat group in Raiwind, Pakistan, on March 13. Photo: AFP

“New Delhi police had filed a first information report earlier against the Tablighi chief, now section 304 has been added,” the spokesman said, referring to culpable homicide in the Indian criminal code, which carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison.

Tablighi Jamaat spokesman Mujeeb-ur Rehman declined to comment, saying that the group had not confirmed reports about the new charges.

Tablighi Jamaat is one of the world’s biggest Sunni Muslim proselytizing organizations, with followers in more than 80 countries, promoting a “pure form of Islam.”

At the beginning of the month, one-third of the nearly 3,000 coronavirus cases in India at that time were either people who attended the Tablighi Jamaat gathering, or those who later came into contact with them, authorities said.

In the coronavirus hot spot of New Delhi, 1,080 of its 1,561 cases were linked to the group’s gathering, city government data released on Wednesday showed.

Tablighi Jamaat administrators had earlier said that many of the followers who visited its headquarters in a narrow, winding lane in New Delhi’s historic Nizamuddin neighborhood were stranded after the government declared a three-week lockdown, and that the center had to offer them shelter.

Critics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have cautioned against fanning communal tension by laying the blame for the spread of the coronavirus on the Muslim group.

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

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

A gathering organized by the group in Malaysia also led to a surge of cases there — as well as in several other Southeast Asian countries.