MUMBAI, Jan 18: A Mumbai court convicted 12 men on Friday of gang-rape, murder and fabricating evidence in the killing of 14 people during one of India’s worst religious riots.

Their sentences will be announced on Monday. All 12 sobbed when Mumbai Sessions Court Judge U.D. Salvi read out the verdict, and said they would appeal the convictions in a higher court.

“We were not involved in the rape,” said Ramesh Chandan, one of the defendants.

The judge acquitted seven other defendants, including five policemen and a husband-and-wife doctor team.

Eleven of the convicted men face possible death sentences for gang-rape, murder and conspiracy in the case, which dates back to the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat state. The 12th, a policeman, was found guilty of fabricating and destroying evidence and faces up to 10 years in prison.

Bilqis Yaqub, then 21 and pregnant, was gang-raped along with her young daughter and another relative on March 3, 2002.

Yaqub’s daughter and the relative were among the 14 people killed when a mob attacked them with stones, swords and iron rods.

About 1,000 people -- most of them Muslims -- were killed during the Gujarat riots, which were believed to have been triggered by an attack on a railway car in which 60 Hindus were burned to death while returning from a religious pilgrimage. While the reasons for the train blaze remain unclear, right-wing Hindu groups claim the fire was started by a Muslim mob.

The resulting religious riots were among India’s worst since its independence from Britain in 1947.

Judge Salvi said evidence from the Central Bureau of Investigation helped decide the case. He said Yaqub’s testimony and the eyewitness account of a boy who was 8 years old when the incident took place were also factors in the decision.

The trial began in 2005 after the Supreme Court transferred the case from Gujarat to Mumbai, the capital of neighbouring Maharashtra state, amid protests by human rights groups that have long accused Gujarat’s Hindu-nationalist state government of protecting the rioters and police officials who allegedly did little to control the carnage. The top court has also accused the state of leniency in handling of Hindus accused of killing Muslims. Gujarat’s government has consistently denied both accusations.

Yaqub told the court she saw the men rape her daughter and relative, and then witnessed them burying the bodies on the outskirts of her village. She said the men had left her for dead.—AP