Indian court hands down 33 life sentences

A court in India made history when it sentenced the most people to prison for life in a single case.The special court in the town of Mehsana in the western state of Gujarat convicted 31 Hindus for setting fire to a building in Sardarpura village in 2002. Among the 33 killed were five men, 17 women, eight boys and three girls.More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died when riots erupted after a train fire killed 60 Hindu pilgrims in 2002. Riots in other Gujarat cities followed for three days.The 31 were found guilty of murder, attempted murder, arson, rioting and criminal conspiracy and were sentenced directly after being found guilty.Another group of 42, mostly Hindus, was acquitted for lack of evidence, the court said.The judge, however, refused to accept the prosecution argument that the accused had hatched a conspiracy to kill the victims, The Times of India said.The violence, in her opinion, was a spontaneous reaction by the villagers. It wasn't planned.The court ordered each of the 31 convicted to pay the equivalent of $1,000 toward compensation for the families of the victims. The court also imposed an additional penalty of nearly $450 each.The judge said in sentencing that the life sentences were because the court couldn't attribute any specific act to a particular accused in the incident.The court heard how the 33 victims had found refuge in a small house near Sardarpura village on the night of Feb. 28, 2002. But they were found by a Hindu mob, which set fire to the house.The bodies of 28 people were found at the scene, with five others dying later from their injuries.The convictions and sentencing ends one of several major police investigations into incidences during the 2002 riots.An inquiry commission set up three years ago by the Gujarat state government into the 2002 riots said that the burning of the train had been a "conspiracy," a report by the BBC said.The commission examined more than 1,000 witnesses during six years of investigations and found that around 37 gallons of gasoline had been bought by rioters specifically to burn the train carriage in what it described as a conspiracy.But in 2005 a federal government inquiry concluded that the train fire had been an accident and likely started by people cooking in one of the carriages.