ON February 28, 2002, three members of the Dawood family were travelling through India in a four-wheel-drive.
They were Saeed Dawood, 42, a sales manager and father-of-three from Mount Pleasant, his cousin Sakil Dawood, 37, an optical technician, and their nephew Imran Dawood, 18, of Soothill.
They were joined by Saeed and Sakil’s childhood friend, Moha
mmed Aswat, 42, a father-of-five from Soothill who worked at Fox’s Biscuits.
The four Batley men were in India for a social visit and had hired a driver to take them on a sightseeing trip to the Taj Mahal.
But their holiday was going to take a nightmarish turn as they drove back from the tourist attraction towards Lajpur, a village in the state of Gujarat.
The day before, the state had been rocked by reports that Muslims had set fire to a train in the city of Godhra, killing 59 Hindus. It was to provoke the worst sectarian violence the region had seen in decades. The car went through the Gujarat border without a hitch but soon came across a roadblock.
Men circled the vehicle and asked the British tourists what religion they belonged to. When they said they were British Muslims, the mob dragged out the hired driver and beat him to death. They threw his body in the car and set fire to it.
The tourists ran away but were chased to a nearby farm. Here, the mob stabbed Mr Aswat and Imran Dawood. Saeed and Sakil Dawood pleaded for their lives, but were killed.
Imran was the only member of the party who survived and was taken to hospital in Mumbai to be treated for stab wounds. Similar atrocities were happening all over Gujarat. Official figures said more than 1,000 people were killed during the three days of violence, most of them Muslims. Others have estimated the total death count to be more than 2,000.
News of the attack on the Batley men hit headlines back in the UK after the Foreign Office announced Mr Aswat’s body had been found and the Dawood cousins were missing.
In the aftermath, human rights groups began to voice concerns that Gujarat’s Hindu government, led by chief minister Narendra Modi, had turned a blind eye to the violence and were not convicting the perpetrators.
In April 2002, India’s National Human Rights Commission issued a report on the sectarian violence. It found “a serious failure of intelligence and action by the state government marked the events leading to the Godhra tragedy and the subsequent deaths and destruction that occurred”.
