Bombay Riots

The bestiality of human mobs was gruesomely exemplified at Bombay last week, when rioting Hindus and Moham-medans stoned and slashed and disemboweled one another until the dead totaled 106 and the wounded over 600, with the seven-day-riot still going on.

Cause. The carnage seemed to .have started when some Hindus became convinced that a group of Pathans-Moham-medans of Afghan extraction-had kidnapped two or three Hindu babes and were going to sacrifice them to Allah. Therefore, in the name of the whole Pantheon of Hindu Gods, stones flew and knives flashed.

The new Governor of Bombay, Sir Frederick Sykes, son-in-law of the late, great Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law, ordered out all available troops and armored cars, but these forces could not do more than check the rioting in restricted areas, though they did prevent the killing of even a single occidental civilian.

Atrocity. One savage interlude, typical of at least a score, will be described. A British sentry, Private Hopkins, was standing rigid and immobile at his post of duty, when a Pathan mob suddenly appeared, whooping in full cry after a Hindu. To have interfered would have been suicide. Private Hopkins stood as quiet as a lamp post. Before his eyes the Hindu was caught, pinioned, kicked, slashed horribly, and finally disemboweled. This fiendish atrocity was too much for a Soldier of the King to bear. Private Hopkins, according to English correspondents, fainted.