“But what they did to my sister-in-law’s sister Kausar Bano was horrific and heinous. She was 9 months pregnant. They cut open her belly, took out her foetus with a sword and threw it into a blazing fire. Then they burnt her as well.” | Saira Banu, Naroda Patia (recorded at the Shah-e-Alam Camp on March 27th, 2002). I took [my daughter] Kauser to the hospital for delivery the day before the attack. She was ready to deliver. But the doctor said there was time and to come back in the morning. But there was no morning after. By then it was all over. And the tragedy is that the people who ripped my daughter’s child out of her body and killed her are walking about freely.
| Khalid Noor Mohammed Sheikh.
Sheikh lost nine family members in the Gujarat genocide, including his pregnant thirty-year-old daughter Kauser Bano. Her belly was cut open and the fetus was pulled out and hacked to pieces before she was killedThey were raping women. Then they were killing them, burning them and cutting them up into pieces. The police killed my son. They shot him…. The government tells us to bring proof when we go to ask for money…. My life was taken away when they shot my son. Everything has been taken away and now they want evidence, where will I get the body from? I wasn’t even able to see his body…
| R. Bibi. Her thirty-six-year-old son was killed by the police in Gujarat genocideShe was pregnant and it was the 9th month of the pregnancy. Her house was attacked by a large mob. Her womb was cut open with a sharp weapon and the unborn baby was taken out and both mother and the child were burnt dead
| The husband of an eighteen-year-old woman told the Citizens’ Initiative:I washed the ladies’ bodies before burial. Some bodies had heads missing, some had hands missing, some were like coal, you would touch them and they would crumble. Some women’s bodies had been split down the middle. I washed seventeen bodies on March 2, only one was completely intact. All had been burned, many had been split down the middle. On March 3 fifteen more bodies came. Then I just threw water over them, I couldn’t stand to be around them anymore.
| A woman who washed the bodies of female victims of Gujarat genocide before burialPetrol instead of water was poured into a boy’s mouth. A lit matchstick was then thrown inside his mouth and the child just blasted apart.
| An eyewitness to the murder of a six-year-old boy named Imran who testified before the Citizens’ Tribunal described.Nineteen members of my family were killed. My wife, my mother, my son, my daughters-in-law, my brother’s daughter-in-law, and others. We found fourteen of the bodies, five are still missing
| Mansoori Abdulbhai. He lost nineteen family members in the Gujarat genocide.Mothers are skewered, children set afire and fathers hacked to pieces.
At 5:30 p.m. a car came, it was the assistant commissioner. They brought us out slowly; some were hiding in the water tank underground. Some tried to get out but were attacked. Sixty-five to seventy people were killed inside. After the police came we told them to take us somewhere safe. They brought us to the camp. We didn’t go to the police station. Three patients were admitted in the civil hospital. On March 3 and 4 the police came here to file complaints, but only after camp organizers called them.
| A thirteen-year-old boy described the role of the police during the Gujarat Genocide.“There has been government participation in Gujarat riots. I had sent several letters to the Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, and also talked to him. But he did not do anything effective.”
| KR Narayanan ,Former President of India.
The Hindu, March 02, 2005I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence as in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports everywhere of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw driver.
| Harsh Mander, March 13, 2002Muslims from all sections of the population were affected, from slum dwellers to businessmen and white collar professionals and senior government bureaucrats. High court judges and Muslim police officers were also attacked. Muslim policemen have since sought special permission to be on duty without their name tags.About 3000 Muslims are killed. Some 20,000 Muslim homes and businesses and 360 places of worship are destroyed, and roughly 150,000 people are displaced.One of the books in my father’s library that got burnt in 2002 was of Martin Luther King and I still remember him reading to us a quote of King’s: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We believe justice will not elude thousands of victims of 2002 riots.
| Zuber Jafri, the youngest of Mr.Ehsan Jafri’s three children.
