Indian Muslim accused of beef smuggling beaten to death

Villagers in northern India have beaten a Muslim to death for attempting to smuggle cattle for slaughter, police said.

Noman, 22, and his four associates were in a truck with around a dozen cattle when they were intercepted by an angry mob near Sarahan village in Himachal Pradesh earlier this week.

Hindus worship cows as a sacred animal and a few Indian states ban slaughtering them.

“The other four persons are in a good state but Noman died because of his injuries”, Soumya Sambasivan, superintendent of police in Sirmaur district told AFP, adding that the victim was Muslim.

“As it was a mob attack, we have registered the case for murder against unknown people”, she said.

Despite the slaughter of cows being widely banned, India ranks as the world s top beef exporter, according to a report by the USA department of agriculture. The man was accused of smuggling cows for slaughter.

This was, however, denied by his family who said he was innocent and that he was hired by a few people for transporting machinery in a truck.

Police are investigating whether the assailants belonged to a Hindu hard-line group which has been accused of carrying out similar attacks in the region over the past weeks.

The killing comes less than a month after the lynching by villagers of Muslim Mohammad Akhlaq, who was dragged from his home near to New Delhi and beaten to death by a hardline Hindu mob over unsubstantiated rumours he had eaten beef.

There is a rising tensions between Hindus and religious minorities in the Uttar Pradesh state, where the incident occurred.

However, a week later, another division bench of the court in Srinagar, while admitting a writ petition challenging the constitutional validity of the penal sections regulating ban on bovine slaughter and beef sale, had issued notices to the state government directing it to file a response within one week.

Tougher measures to safeguard cows have been used in the past as a rallying call by politicians seeking to win Hindu votes, sometimes leading to Hindu-Muslim riots.

Violence by Hindu fringe groups has increased since Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to power previous year.

Muslim cleric Maulana Khalid Rasheed attended the event, in which participants drank cow milk.

Cows are considered holy by many, but not all, Hindus, who form the majority of India’s population.