Family Challenges Indian State Over Murders By Mob

The campaign for justice by the family of three British tourists killed in India goes before a court today with potentially devastating evidence against a state government.

Lawyers will describe to a district court in India how the group from Yorkshire was attacked by a vengeful mob when they ventured into an area which had been hit by anti-Muslim violence allegedly sponsored by the government of Gujarat state.

It will be the first stage in a civil prosecution of the most prominent figures in the Gujarat government which is run by the rightwing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party.

Lawyers coordinated from London by Imran Khan, the solicitor who handled the Stephen Lawrence and Leeds United assault cases, will say that officials were involved in the riots, which left 2,000 people dead, and then attempted to shield the Britons' murderers.

The case has caused tensions between Britain and India, with the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, raising the issue with his Indian counterpart. Help from forensic experts and British police has been turned down by investigators in Gujarat.

The killings took place in February 2002 when the tourists were stopped at an unofficial roadblock manned by Hindu extremists after a police patrol had told them it was safe to proceed. The group was made up of an Indian driver, three Yorkshire businessmen, Saeed Dawood, Sakil Dawood, Mohammed Aswat, and the Dawoods' teenage nephew, Imran Dawood, who survived the attack but was left for dead.

Yusuf Dawood, Saeed's brother, said yesterday: "They found themselves at the mercy of a mob on the rampage who just wanted to kill Muslims. They were clearly British - they showed their passports - but it was enough that they were Muslims." The Dawood family left India more than a century ago and moved to Britain from Fiji.

Saeed, 41, a sales manager for an electricity company, and Sakil, 37, an optical technician, were hauled out of their minibus and killed by the mob, which was enraged by an earlier attack by Muslims on a train which killed 58 Hindus. The vehicle was set on fire and the driver, Yusuf Palagar, and Mr Aswat who worked for Fox's Biscuits in Batley, West Yorkshire, also died.

Today's hearing rests in part on evidence provided by Imran, 20, a tourism and leisure student. But the lawyers also have eyewitness evidence faxed to Britain soon after the incident describing the murders in detail and naming 10 people responsible.

"Our case goes into both the organisation of the genocide in which our family was tragically caught up, but also the omissions of the subsequent investigation," said Yusuf, a commercial surveyor in Cambridge.

"Six people were arrested after the murders but we believe that was simply to relieve international pressure. We don't want the wrong people to go down for this. We want the ones who did it to go down."

The action follows a scathing judgment last month on the riots by India's supreme court, which accused the state's government and its leader, Narendra Modi, of turning a blind eye to the violence.

If successful it would lead to compensation claims against Mr Modi and state officials and may have consequences for domestic Indian politics.

Mr Modi was met with protests last August when he spoke at a rally in Wembley. The Home Office said at the time he was not an official guest of the British government and it understood the feelings aroused by his visit.