NEW DELHI, 17 April — With her three-year-old son Faizan in her arms, Sultani Rasul Sheikh fled with 33 members of her extended family when their home in Gujarat’s Delol village was attacked by an armed mob Feb. 28.

After spending a day in a lime orchard, Sultani and some 40 others left for a nearby town in a truck driven by her husband Feroze. When he swerved to avoid a mob on the highway, the vehicle flipped over, leaving its occupants to the mercy of the horde.

Overpowered by a group of men as she ran toward a field, Sultani was dragged to a riverbed, where Faizan fell from her arms as she was stripped and gang-raped. “One by one the men raped me,” she told members of a team of six women’s rights activists who met her at a relief camp in the Panchmahals district. “All the while I could hear my son crying. I lost count after three.”

Sultani is just one of the numerous women who have fallen victim to the sectarian violence that has rocked Gujarat since Feb. 27, claiming over 900 lives.

Her testimony, as well as those of several other women who survived molestation or rape in the first few days of the communal violence, has been documented in a report put together by the women activists, including noted peace campaigner Syeda Hameed and journalist Farah Naqvi. The testimonies are a spine-chilling documentation of the communal frenzy that gripped Gujarat after 58 people were torched in a train at the Godhra railway station.

“I saw Farzana being raped by Guddu Chara. Farzana was about 13 years old,” Azharuddin, 13, told the women activists when they met him at relief camp in Ahmedabad. “They put a rod in Farzana’s stomach. She was later burned.”

The report — titled “How has the Gujarat massacre affected minority women? The survivors speak” — was compiled by the women, who represent activist groups from all over India, after they visited Ahmedabad, Kheda, Baroda, Sabarkantha and Panchmahals districts during March 27-31. It concludes the violence that followed the Godhra killings was planned, organized and precisely targeted members of the Muslim community. The violence has the “makings of a larger agenda for the subjugation, crushing and elimination of religious minorities.”

“We have been shaken and numbed by the scale and brutality of the violence that is still continuing,” Hameed, a former member of the National Commission for Women, told a news conference yesterday after releasing the report.

“The violence defies all imagination.” Malini Ghosh, of the Delhi-based Nirantar group and a member of the team, said: “There is compelling evidence that extreme and brutal forms of sexual violence was perpetrated. We have only printed those that we could corroborate. There were many cases we heard about that were not reported.” Besides adding support to demands from other rights groups for the removal of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his handling of the sectarian strife, the report recommends that the testimonies of the women and other victims alone should be used by the police as the basis for further legal action.

“The technical due processes of law can’t be followed as it is not a normal situation,” said Naqvi.