A special Ahmedabad court Tuesday handed down a death sentence to 11 Muslims convicted of Gohra case

A special Ahmedabad court Tuesday handed down a death sentence to 11 Muslims convicted of setting fire to a passenger train in the western Indian state of Gujarat nine years

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A policeman looked towards a burnt train coach at the Godhra railway station, Ahmedabad, India.The court gave a lesser sentence of life imprisonment to the 20 others also convicted of participating in the same massacre that left dead nearly 60 Hindus returning from a religious pilgrimage. The incident set off one of the worst few days of communal violence in India's recent history, leaving dead more than 1,000 people—mostly Muslims.

The court last week had found 31 of 94 people accused in the case guilty of conspiracy and murder. The other 63 were acquitted in the trial that began in July 2009 in Ahmedabad's Sabarmati Central Jail.

J. M. Panchal, special public prosecutor, told reporters outside the court that even though all 31 were convicted of similar charges in connection with setting fire to the train carriage, the judge appeared to have had awarded differing sentences depending on the degree of involvement of those accused.

"The court must have felt that so far as the 11 persons handed death sentences are concerned, it is the rarest of the rare case," he said.

Another member of the prosecution team, Rajendra Tewari, said the team had yet to see the approximately 900 page-long-judgment and so it was, "difficult to say exactly what the full findings of the court are."

He said the life sentences handed to the 20 people would result in them spending about 14 years in jail—and would be adjusted to accommodate the nine years virtually all of them had already been imprisoned.