India to hang mob leader who murdered missionary

Churches were guarded by armed police in the Indian state of Orissa last night after the death sentence was passed against the ringleader of a mob that murdered an Australian missionary and his two young sons by burning them alive as they slept in their Jeep.

Thousands gathered outside the court as Dara Singh, a Hindu activist whose supporters formed "Dara's Army", was sentenced to be hanged for killing Graham Staines, 57, and his boys Philip, 10, and Timothy, eight, nearly five years ago.

The murder of the boys and Mr Staines, a Baptist who spent 30 years in India working with leprosy patients, at a church in a remote village in eastern Orissa, sent a wave of disgust around the world.

Twelve other men were sentenced yesterday to life for their part in the murders, among the worst hate crimes for years against the Christian minority in India, just 2 per cent of the 1.2 billion population.

After the murders, Mr Staines' widow, Gladys, continued his work with the poor and sick in Orissa.

The crimes appear to have been the result of wide fear and suspicion among impoverished Hindus about the proselytising of missionaries, frequently accused of browbeating, or even bribing, people into conversion and introducing anti-Hindu practices or Western ways.

One of the convicted men has said he was provoked by the "corruption of tribal culture" by the missionaries; rumours circulated that they were feeding people beef, forbidden to Hindus, and giving sanitary napkins and bras to women. "After hearing so many things about the Christians, we decided to kill the Christians," he wrote while he was on the run.

The death penalty is relatively rare in India. In 30 years, fewer than 50 people have been hanged. Mrs Staines, 52, yesterday read a statement live by phone on India's NDTV channel, saying: "I have forgiven the killers and I have no bitterness because forgiveness brings healing and our land needs healing from hatred and violence. I have no comment regarding the law taking its own course in crime and punishment."

Just after the murders, she travelled India with her 17-year-old daughter, talking to people about how she copes with the tragedy, and kept running the home for leprosy patients which her husband set up on a 36-acre campus in the town of Baripada.

In January, she will open a 10-bed clinic in her husband's memory. She is also planning a 40-bed general hospital for leprosy sufferers. "The feeling of this enormous loss of losing your husband and two children keeps coming back again and again," she told the BBC. "I manage to cope with it. It helps that local people are very supportive of what we do, and I continue to feel at home."

Before the sentences were passed, Mr Staines' brother John, who lives in Australia, told the Australian Associated Press: "We have forgiven them in Christ's name. I think these men have to face up to what they've done. By the same token, I don't want to see them put to death over it. Anything that Man does in these things doesn't count for very much because God is the final judge."

Hundreds of police were yesterday dispatched to guard churches and Christian clerics ahead of the sentencing for fear of a backlash from the supporters of Singh, a petty criminal from Uttar Pradesh until he took up his violent campaign. Some 5,000 people gathered outside the court in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, to await the verdict.

Indian police believe Singh, who is also accused of an attack on a Muslim, and a Catholic priest after the Staines murders, was sheltered for a year by sympathetic villagers.