NEW DELHI, July 14 (Xinhua) -- A Muslim family was brutally attacked and robbed on board a train in India, police said Friday.
The family members including women and a physically disabled child were assaulted with iron rods on a moving train in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday evening.
The mob mostly comprising of young men barged into their coach, breaking glass of the windows.
Family members told media and police, the attackers identified them as Muslims after noticing veil-clad women accompanying them.
"We were attacked with rods. They robbed us and molested the women. They did not spare even my 17-year-old mentally challenged son," a family member Shakir told local media. "These people jumped inside the train, groped the women and snatched their chains."
A local newspaper The Hindu quoted senior police officer O P Singh as saying that four of the family suffered head injuries, four others suffered hand fractures and all 11 had internal bleeding in the stomach.
Reports said railway police have filed a case and detained three men for questioning and no arrests were made so far.
The video of the family pleading as they were being assaulted went viral on social media websites. It shows young men armed with rods and sticks abusing the family, banging the coach from outside and breaking the glass on the emergency window to make their entry.
A police officer of the investigation told media the women in the family appeared to have been molested as their clothes were torn.
Last month in a similar incident a Muslim teenager Junaid Khan and his cousins were attacked on a moving train in neighboring Haryana. Khan was stabbed to death by the mob who called them "beef-eaters," while his cousins were severely thrashed.
Khan's killing triggered protests named Not in My Name in various Indian cities to protest the rising attacks on Muslims by Hindu vigilante cow protection groups.
The vigilantism around cows seems to have intensified since 2014, the year Bhartiya Janta Party ascended to power under the leadership of Narendra Modi.
Cow slaughtering is a sensitive issue in India and sometimes flares up communal passions. Beef, however, is part of diet to many minority groups in the country, who consume it without any taboo.
Modi has been criticizing the cow vigilantes. However, his rebuke has neither stopped attacks against cattle traders nor mob lynching in the name of beef eating.
