We don’t need gas chambers. We turn homes into ovens to bake humans For nearly 14 hours, the family remained on the roof

As rioters set their two-storey house ablaze on Tuesday evening, Mohammad Idris Saifi and 10 family members ran up the steps to huddle on the roof, which slowly turned searing hot and got enveloped in smoke. “Prepare to die,” the attackers had shouted from below. But fortunately for the family, the roof did not collapse and the fire subsided on its own. For nearly 14 hours, Idris, 71, wife Jameela, 68, their two sons and their wives, and their five grandchildren — Musqan, 15, Nargis 13, Belal, 12, Abdal, 12, and Abbas, 8 — remained on the roof, muttering prayers. Whenever the children began to weep, the elders shushed them lest their cries alert the rioters. “This roof saved us. They wanted us to die but the fire did not reach the roof,” Idris told The Telegraph on Friday. “I shall never forget the horror in my lifetime,” his eldest son Mobin said. “The children are traumatised; they wake up in the middle of the night shouting, ‘Papa, mummy bachao (help)’.” Idris’s home in Brijpuri, northeast Delhi, was among hundreds of dwellings that the marauding mobs, armed with guns and iron rods, had targeted on Monday through Wednesday. The death toll rose to 42 on Friday. BJP leader Kapil Mishra had on Sunday set a three-day deadline for ending the protests against the new citizenship law.


Eyewitnesses say the mobs broke open, looted and torched Muslim-owned shops, houses and vehicles in Brijpuri, a Hindu-dominated neighbourhood, and in the adjoining pockets of Jaffrabad, Maujpur, Karawal Nagar, Ghonda, Chanbagh, Baburpur, Gokulpuri, Yamuna Vihar and Bhajanpura. According to the police, 42 people have died in the violence so far and over 200 are injured. The Saifis had sensed trouble early. Since Tuesday morning, armed groups had marched past their home many times, shouting “Jai Shri Ram”. Eventually, a mob broke down the house’s iron gate around 5pm. Jameela and her daughters-in-law Seema, 36, and Salma, 34, fell to their knees and begged for mercy. Their husbands Mobin, 42, and Yamin, 40, sought “forgiveness” with folded hands. One of the attackers told them to run up to the roof, from where the family heard the house being ransacked. Their TV set, a child’s tricycle, two scooters and a motorbike parked on the ground floor were set on fire. The rioters had also taken away around Rs 20,000 in cash and some jewellery, the family later found. From the roof, they had heard someone shout “petrol”. Minutes later, flames began leaping up from below and the roof started getting hotter and hotter. Three of the children began vomiting as smoke and soot engulfed the roof. “We were so horrified…. The children began crying but we asked them to keep quiet, lest it instigate the mob to come and get us. We asked them to pray. The elders too started reciting Quranic verses to keep calm,” Seema said. She said the family had covered themselves with tarpaulin sheets to make it difficult for the mob to see them in the dark even if they invaded the roof. “Nobody came. Since they had set the house ablaze, they must have assumed we were already dead.”