“When the fire started, he screamed for help and asked people to help us get out of the house. There is no way to get outside from upstairs, but we thought he would have escaped,” Mr. Samsudeen said. “In the morning when we came back to see our house, we found his body.”

Mr. Basith’s uncle, Mohammed Maleek, said he was in communication with Mr. Basith in his final minutes and that his nephew had assured him he would be safe because the police were everywhere.

In an audio message sent to his uncle, Mr. Basith described the scene as the mob could be heard outside. The audio was circulating in Kandy after his death and as a sign of its authenticity, a cabinet minister who had visited the scene referred to the message in Parliament on Tuesday.

“They have broken all the doors in our house, large stones are falling inside,” Mr. Basith said in the message. “Hello, yes I am inside our house and they are burning something. There are flames coming inside.”

Later, his voice grew tense.

“They have burned the house,” he said. “The house is burning.”

The latest tensions, coming a week after similar mob attacks against Muslims in an eastern region, erupted after a Sinhalese truck driver was injured by a group of Muslim men in what has been described as a road rage incident. The man died from his injuries on Saturday.

After his death, officials and Kandy residents said, extremist Buddhist monks who have incited communal violence in the past descended on the area, offering their condolences. But many believed that their presence amid the tensions fueled the violent backlash against the Muslims.

“Two controversial Buddhist monks who have been at the center of similar anti-minority clashes before had been in the area on Sunday night,” said Rishad Bathiudeen, Sri Lanka’s minister of industry and commerce who was in Kandy to survey the damage. “We demand their arrest for inciting communal violence.”