India ? Hundreds of Christians, fearing more clashes with Hindu nationalists, fled to government-run relief camps where authorities on Saturday were providing them with food, medicine and security.

The clashes left at least four people dead last week, including three killed when police fired on a group of hard-line Hindus that had torched a police station in Kandhamal district’s Brahmangaon village. Another person also died in the communal fighting.

The Hindus had complained that the police were failing to protect them from Christians.

The killings and subsequent flight of nearly 700 Christians to four relief camps are the latest in a series of religious and political power struggles in the secular but Hindu-dominated India’s eastern state of Orissa, which has one of the worst histories of anti-Christian violence.