NEW DELHI, March 4 (UPI) -- Muslims in India's western state of Gujarat are undergoing shaves to mask their identities to avoid the fury of rampaging Hindu mobs who have lynched more than 400 Muslims in the last four days of religious riots.
Muslim men have taken the caps off their heads and shaved their beards.
Any Muslim seen in Ahmedabad city wearing a cap is immediately attacked and lynched by marauding mobs that ruled the city streets for three days, brandishing swords and knives.
The Telegraph newspaper reported that three men arrived in Ahmedabad on Sunday wearing traditional Muslim caps and sporting flowing beards. Within hours they ended up in ditches, dead.
They had come to see their relatives who were targeted by Hindu mobs. They were spotted by a mob as they walked out of the train station.
Two were stabbed to death instantly, while the third man tried in vain to run away. He was chased and killed in the ditch into which he had fallen. The other two bodies were thrown into the same ditch, and all three were set on fire, the news report said.
Since most barber shops are closed due to a curfew in 32 towns, Muslims are helping themselves with the razor.
"Razor on beard is better than a knife slit on a throat," Mustaffa Qureshi, a Muslim in Ahmedabad, told United Press International in a telephone interview.
"I got both my sons to shave their beards. I also asked them not to wear caps till things return to normal," Sheikh Aftab of Bapunagar, his head capless and his face beardless, told The Telegraph newspaper.
He said many in the area had done the same.
Altaf Hussein, another Ahmedabad resident, says many men were stripped to see if they are circumcised to establish their Muslim identity before they were lynched and set ablaze.
Hindu men are not circumcised.
Meanwhile, rumormongers were having a field day in Gujarat state.
Rumors of young Hindu girls being kidnapped, raped and killed by Muslims, and that Muslim children were being poisoned by Hindus, have spread like fire in the curfew-bound towns.
More than 400 people have been killed in four days of the bloodiest religious rioting in India in more than a decade. Unofficial estimates put the figure at 500.
The toll is expected to rise as more and more bodies are being retrieved from the rubble of houses and shops that were torched by mobs.
Religious violence in Gujarat broke out Wednesday when at least 58 Hindus, mostly women and children, died after a train they were traveling on was set ablaze.
At least 27 Muslims have been arrested for the train attack and 1,200 Hindu rioters arrested.
The train was returning from Ayodhya city, where Hindu extremists are planning to build a temple on the site of a destroyed mosque.
To avenge the train attack, Hindu mobs attacked Muslim homes and businesses across Gujarat.
India is predominantly Hindu -- 82 percent of more than 1 billion people practice the religion. But 12 percent of the population is Muslim.
