Spread of Coronavirus in India by Tablighi Jamaat
India has brought charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder against the chief of a Muslim seminary for holding a gathering last month that authorities say led to a big jump in coronavirus infections, police said yesterday.
The headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat group in a cramped corner of Delhi were sealed and thousands of followers, including some from Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, were taken into quarantine after it emerged they had attended meetings there in mid-March.
Police initially filed a case against Muhammad Saad Kandhalvi, the chief of the centre, for violating a ban on big gatherings but had now invoked the law against culpable homicide, a police spokesman said.
"Delhi police had filed a first information report earlier against the Tablighi chief, now section 304 has been added," the officer said, referring to culpable homicide in the penal code, which carries a maximum punishment of a 10-year prison term.
Authorities said at the beginning of the month that a third of the nearly 3,000 coronavirus cases at that time were either people who attended the Tablighi gathering or those who were later exposed to them.
India's tally of coronavirus infections has since jumped to 12,380, including 414 deaths, as of yesterday .
Officials have rejected suggestions they were unfairly targeting the Muslim community, but said they had to rebuke the group because it had behaved irresponsibly by ignoring social-distancing rules.
Pakistan has recorded 6,505 cases according to its latest data, a jump of 520 over the previous day. About 60 percent of Pakistan's cases load was linked to the Tablighi or were people who had gone on religious pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia and Iran, officials said.
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