Minister sees India train wreckage

An Indian Muslim family look for valuables in the wreckage of their home

GODHRA, India (CNN) -- India's home minister L.K. Advani has visited the site of a train attack that sparked days of religious riots in Gujarat, blamed for more than 450 deaths.

Advani stepped aboard the charred remains of a train coach, where 58 people died -- mostly Hindu activists -- when a mob of suspected Muslims firebombed the train Wednesday.

Touring hospitals in the state's commercial capital Ahmedabad and visiting the injured, the minister promised the situation was now under control.

"When a holocaust of this kind happens as it has over the past five days, obviously people will be scared and it is our job as the administration to reassure them," he said.

Mobs of Hindus and Muslims laid siege to the state's commercial capital, Ahmedabad, and other parts of Gujarat, in violence sparked by the deadly train attack. About 3,000 soldiers are patrolling the streets of Gujarat to help police maintain order.

VIDEO CNN's Satinder Bindra reports on a town ripped apart by Hindus firebombing and killing Muslims after a train carrying Hindu activists was set on fire. Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)   MORE STORIES • Home minister visits attack site  • Vajpayee: Rioting a 'disgrace to nation'  • Ayodhya: India's religious flashpoint    RESOURCES Gallery: Hindu-Muslim violence flares up  Gallery: Godhra train fire     CNN.com Asia More news from our Asia edition

Advani said reports of violence have decreased over the past 24 hours, but some of the fighting has spread in rural areas of Gujarat.

"The situation has become normal in most parts of Gujarat. No major incidents have been reported so far Sunday," senior state official Ashok Narayan told Reuters.

But he said tension was still high in some rural parts of the troubled state and there had been "sporadic incidents."

Overnight, a mob burned four people alive in Palampur town and police shot dead one of the attackers as they tried to disperse them.

Narayan said 485 people had died across Gujarat since Wednesday, including the 58 Hindus burned alive in the train attack.

Telling horrific tales, victims urged the government to act.

"Both Hindus and Muslims have gone mad -- otherwise how could people kill each other," Thodaji Nagai Prajapati, a 46-year-old driver covered in burns and bandages, told Reuters from his hospital bed Sunday.

Baker Moin-uddin Sheikh, 31, watched his family die in an attack Friday in which 65 Muslims were burned alive.

"I saw my father, sister and mother being burned alive. Despite pleas for help nobody came to our rescue," he said.

"Will someone take action against them for being responsible for my family's brutal killing?"

Many of the dead were burned alive when mobs attacked Muslim homes and shops. Police also shot dead 80 as they tried to assert control.

India's leading Hindu radical group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), appealed for peace and another Hindu group was due to announce if it would delay plans to build a controversial temple that has also fuelled Hindu-Muslim tensions.

The Hindu activists on board the train were returning from Ayodhya, where they had been showing support for the decision to build the Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque destroyed by Hindus nearly a decade ago.

That act sparked nationwide riots in 1992 and has been blamed for thousands of deaths.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has appealed for a delay in building the temple, but critics say he has been too slow to rein in Hindu hardliners to ease communal tensions.

Vajpayee's BJP party backed the temple until forced to drop the divisive policy by its allies in the national coalition government.

The former mosque site is being guarded by thousands of police to keep out Hindu fundamentalists, led by the World Hindu Council,

who have vowed to begin construction of the temple at the site on March 15.

Police have halted trains, blocked roads and sealed off the city, where only 550 hard-core Hindu activists of the Council now remain, police and council officials said Sunday. The rest of the 20,000 who had assembled there last week, helping carve stone pillars for the proposed temple, had left voluntarily.

About 10,000 were waiting in surrounding towns, officials and Hindu leaders said. The Hindu Council president, Ashok Singhal, told reporters in the Indian capital, New Delhi, that the plan to start the construction on March 15 "remains the same."

"I want to appeal to the countrymen and the followers of my holy religion to maintain peace and brotherhood in this divine land," he said.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf Saturday pressed India to do more to protect its 12 percent Muslim minority -- one of the world's largest Muslim populations.

"The carnage must be brought to an end. All those responsible for the violence need to be arrested and punished," he said.

Pakistan, which borders Gujarat, and Bangladesh, to India's east, last week boosted security for their Hindu minorities.

CNN Producer Suhasini Haidar contributed to this report