Rampage as `Bandit Queen' is cremated

Supporters of India's "Bandit Queen" went on the rampage over her murder as police began a search for a suspect in the killing…

Supporters of India's "Bandit Queen" went on the rampage over her murder as police began a search for a suspect in the killing of a woman whose journey from law breaker to lawmaker won her national respect in the end.

Activists of the Samajwadi Party, blaming political rivals for the death of their heroine, threw stones and smashed windscreens of cars parked outside the house where Phoolan Devi's body lay bedecked with flowers in a sprawling garden before her cremation.

In Uttar Pradesh, Devi's home state, which she twice represented in parliament, one person was killed when police returned fire at an angry mob which was protesting against her killing and fired at a police patrol, the United News of India said.

Later, her mother and sisters sobbed as Mr Umed Singh, Devi's businessman husband, lit her pyre beside the river Ganges in Mirzapur town in Uttar Pradesh.

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There was no national outpouring of grief. But there was a simple newspaper headline, "A Queen is Dead", and commentators praised the courage of Devi who fought for the downtrodden and oppressed.

Masked gunmen showered bullets on the stocky 37-year-old as she returned to her Delhi home from parliament on Wednesday. Police said yesterday they had already identified one of the men who fled the crime scene in a car.

Mr Qamar Ahmed, Delhi's additional commissioner of police for crime, told reporters they were looking for the driver of the car in which the killers fled from Devi's house in the heart of New Delhi. "He [the driver] had also driven Phoolan Devi [from home] to parliament in the morning," Mr Ahmed said.