Nizamuddin
Nizamuddin, which is the international headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, will cooperate with the authorities, it said in a statement.
“During this entire episode, Markaz Nizamuddin never violated any provision of law, and always tried to act with compassion and reason towards the visitors who came to Delhi from different states. It did not let them violate the medical guidelines by thronging interstate bus terminuses (ISBTS) or roaming on streets,” the statement said.
Markaz said when the Prime Minister announced the Janata Curfew on March 22, the ongoing programme was discontinued immediately, but a large number of people were stuck in the premises due to the closure of railway services on March 21.
The Delhi government banned on March 13 any seminar or conferences having more than 200 people in the city. Three days later, it prohibited any form of religious, academic, political, social, cultural, personal gathering involving over 50 people.
The Telangana administration is estimating that over 1,000 people from the state might have attended the religious congregation in Nizamuddin, a senior official said adding the search is on to identify people who came in contact with them. The state government intensified its efforts following the death of seven people who attended the congregation.
Maharashtra state minority development minister Nawab Malik said Tablighi Jamaat some 100 people from Maharashtra attended the congregation. Health Minister Rajesh Tope instructed authorities to trace the state citizens who visited Nizamuddin.
As many as 14 of the 17 new coronavirus patients in Andhra Pradesh who tested positive on Tuesday had attended the meeting in the national capital. While one person got afflicted upon his return from Medina, two others contracted it from a Mecca returnee in Karnataka.
Twelve people from Meghalaya and four from Tripura had attended the congregation, the state governments said.
Nationals from the UK and France are among 281 foreigners out of 1,830 people who were found by the Delhi police in last two days at Markaz, Delhi Police officials said. Most of those who were found at the facility have been shifted to different quarantine centres and isolation wards of hospitals.
The first indications of the site being a source of the disease came in the middle of last week when officials in four regions – Andaman, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kashmir – began working back the travel histories of patients who tested positive there.
Eight of these people, including seven who went to Hyderabad and one who went to Srinagar, have succumbed to the disease. All of them had been to the building in Nizamuddin — which shares a boundary with the police station and is close to the famous Nizamuddin Auliya shrine.
Shortly after, the district surveillance officer in Delhi went to the area to screen people for symptoms and collect their samples.
Till now, the most serious instances of the disease spread in India have been in large local clusters -- such as the groups infected in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara, Maharashtra’s Sangli and in Punjab’s Banga. The patients linked to the Tablighi Jamaat have fanned out across the country, in some instances infecting locals, raising the spectre of having triggered community transmission.
The Tablighi Jamaat, a sect of preachers that travels across the world to encourage other Muslims to follow the faith, traces its origins in UP and has several chapters outside of the country. The biggest outside India is in Pakistan’s Raiwind, where the congregation this month was linked to at least 30 infections.
A more serious spread from a sect’s gathering was reported from Malaysia, where at least 500 from the nearly 16,000 who gathered for the four-day event starting on February 27 at the Sri Petaling mosque compound, according to a New York Times report. Three days later, they dispersed to other countries, including India, Pakistan and Indonesia – the three other prominent countries where the sect was next scheduled to hold congregations.