GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) - Police recovered six bodies in India's north-eastern state of Assam, raising the death toll from a week of ethnic violence between local tribes and Muslim settlers to 53, officials said on Wednesday.
Police said the toll could rise as they reach remote regions and retrieve more bodies. The six recovered overnight were of victims killed in previous clashes that have also left 85,000 people homeless and taking shelter in government camps.
Hundreds of police have fanned out to keep the peace and look for bodies of riot victims. Officials said there was tension.
"No violence took place in last 24 hours," said Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, a senior police officer in charge of law and order.
Violence broke out between mainly Hindu tribesmen and Muslim Bangladeshi settlers in the oil and tea-rich state on Friday, reigniting a long-simmering conflict fed by the indigenous population's fear of being overrun by Muslim immigrants.
More than 40 percent of Assam is now Muslim, mainly immigrant settlers. Some of the tribespeople are Christians.
The violence is some of the worst since 1983, when more than 2,000 people, mainly Bangladeshi immigrants, were killed in clashes with tribal people in central Assam.
The current conflict was sparked by an increasingly strong student movement that has been campaigning against immigrants, analysts say.
India's northeast, made up of eight states, is home to more than 200 ethnic groups and has been racked by separatist and tribal insurgencies since 1947.
Locals accuse New Delhi of taking away the region's mineral and forest resources, neglecting development and allowing in a flood of outsiders.
(Reporting by Biswajyoti Das; Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and Alex Richardson)
