Thousands of tourists were stranded in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, yesterday after angry mobs set fire to vehicles and attacked local police in protest at the death of four Muslims in a traffic accident.

Police imposed a curfew on the city in northern India and told visitors and residents to stay indoors, while they brought in armed reinforcements to control the rioting, in which one person was killed and 50 injured.

Local authorities kept open the Taj Mahal – the 17th-century monument to love that was voted one of the new Seven Wonders of the World and is India’s top tourist site, attracting 20,000 visitors every day. Few tourists dared to leave their hotels, however, and the curfew blocked access to the white marble mausoleum.

Schools and colleges were shut for three days in the city, whose population of 1.6 million people is about 20 per cent Muslim and has a long history of communal violence.

The rioting began after a speeding lorry killed four people at dawn as they were walking home after marking the Shab-e-Barat festival, when Muslims pray for the dead.

Angry crowds of Muslims set 11 lorries on fire, including the one involved in the accident, and nine other vehicles before blocking the highway connecting Agra with Delhi, about 130 miles (200km) to the northwest.

Police tried to break up the crowd by firing teargas and live rounds into the air but were pelted with stones, sticks and bottles. One protester was shot dead. The crowd later set fire to a shoe factory in Agra, which is in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh – one of the poorest and most populous regions of India.

“The cause of this violence was that traffic was not regulated properly. Trucks were allowed into a no-entry zone meant for pedestrians who were going for the Shab-e-Barat procession,” said J. N. Chamber, a spokesman for the state government.

Fatal traffic accidents often trigger riots in India because bystanders prefer to mete out justice on the spot rather than relying on the notoriously corrupt and inefficient police force and judiciary. It was not clear what happened to the lorry driver in yesterday’s accident but errant drivers are sometimes beaten to death.

Local officials, hoteliers and tour operators said that the rioting had died down by last night and did not threaten visitors to Agra.

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