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NEW DELHI, March 3: Army units fanned out across the communally sensitive regions of India’s western state of Gujarat on Sunday, where the death toll after four days of religious violence was believed to have crossed 500, official sources said.
The state administration said it had ordered cable operators in Gujarat to blackout PTV and threatened to blackout Indian satellite channels if they showed provocative pictures. The government had briefly put a ban on Star News on Saturday for defying its orders.
In the volatile town of Godhra, police said they had arrested a local municipal councillor for his alleged involvement in a fierce attack on a train on Wednesday by suspected Muslim extremists in which 58 people including rightwing Hindu activists were killed.
“PTV has been banned from today (Sunday) and it will remain banned until the situation improves,” Gujarat Home Minister Gordhanbhai Zadafia said.
Accusing the PTV reportage of fanning the communal flames in Gujarat, Zadafia said: “Sometimes authorities have to take certain actions in the interests of society at large. Such telecasts have spread violence.”
Earlier on Sunday, Chief Minister Narendra Modi had warned that if any satellite television channel telecast programmes which were “not in the interest of communal harmony, they would be banned.”
Even in the remote areas of central Gujarat, tension was running high and villages were being attacked by mobs.
On Sunday, police put the death toll at 485. An official said a further 73 people had been killed in police firing.
“Most parts of Gujarat are now very quiet,” he said, adding that the rise in the death toll since Saturday was the result of a more comprehensive body count, rather than fresh violence.
Three people of a minority group were torched to death by a mob at the Maninagar railway station, the police said.
Two other people were stabbed to death in an industrial area on the outskirts of the city.
Curfew imposed at 47 places remained in force on the third day on Sunday as violence spread to even rural areas in south, north and central Gujarat.
In Deodhar village in Banaskantha district, six persons died in overnight violence. Two succumbed to police firing while four others died in mob violence, the police said in Ahmedabad quoting a delayed report. At least 30 people died in police firing during the last three days in Ahmedabad, the police said.
In another incident, over 10 trucks were torched by a violent mob in Aslali village.
The Press Trust of India said police fired on a mob which set afire huts and vehicles on Sunday and a press photographer escaped an attempt on his life as rioters defying curfew indulged in sporadic violence in curfew-bound Pandesara, Limbayat, Rander and Raghunathpura areas of Surat.
Police firing on the mob at Pandasara industrial area left two injured, police sources said.
The mob set fire to autorickshaws in Sagarmpura and set some huts afi