Five members of a Muslim family were burned to death when a Hindu mob set fire to houses in western Gujarat state, police said Wednesday, declaring the death toll from five weeks of religious violence had reached 815.

The attack took place late Tuesday, when a huge mob of Hindus set fire to three houses in Abhasana village, 80 kilometers south of Ahmedabad, the state's largest city, said Vikas Sahay, the superintendent of police for the region.

He said the bodies of the five dead, including two women and a child, were found by firefighters early Wednesday, a day before Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was due to visit the state.

Sahay said that 42 Muslims in the houses suffered burn injuries and were hospitalized in the nearest town,

Dethroj.

Tens of thousands of Indians made homeless by Hindu-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat endure harassment and lack adequate food, sanitation and medical care at relief camps, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

In a report on India's deadliest Hindu-Muslim communal strife in a decade, the London-based human rights organisation called for an authority to protect the camps other than Gujarat's police, which "failed to intervene during the violence and sometimes even actively connived with the attackers."

More than 800 people -- most of them Muslims -have died since riots broke out following a February 27 attack by a Muslim-led crowd on a train carrying Hindu activists.