In three days (9–11 September) of rioting, official statistics peg the number of casualties among Hindus and Sikhs at more than thrice that of Muslims; almost the entire Hindu population had to be evacuated to Rawalpindi.
[2] In early August, the editor of Guru Ghantal—a Hindu Newspaper based in Lahore and having a large audience in Kohat—was prosecuted for publishing inflammatory articles attacking Islam.
[2][3] One particular bhajan, allegedly written by a poet from Jammu, gave calls to evict all Muslims to Arabia and to construct a Vishnu Temple at Kaaba.
[2] However, the pamphlet had a cover image of Krishna alongside an engraving of om, and Hindus objected to the burning by observing a day-long bandh which was withdrawn upon Deputy Commissioner Reilly threatening to arrest the organizer.
[3] While no significant developments transpired till the following week, the situation was rapidly deteriorating — on 7 September, Hindus would petition Chief Commissioner of the Province, K. N. Bolton about the precarities they faced and bias of Khan, "a Muslim".
[2] Everybody was asked to attend the evening congregational prayers at Haji Bahadur Mosque where preachers gave incendiary speeches about protecting Islam from enemies, and threatened to engage in tunes with Sharia unless their demands were met by next morning;[2] Ahmed Gul and a few others pleaded for sanity but to little avail.
[2] In the morning of 9 September, a Muslim crowd, exceeding the strength of a thousand and mostly composed of young boys, demonstrated before Reilly and compelled him to let Khan start an immediate inquiry.
[4] Street-fighting raged on till about 7 PM, when the local police finally managed to exert control with aid from the nearby army regiments, and drove away the crowd.
The next morning, thousands of Muslims from neighboring villages infiltrated into Kohat — by as many as thirteen breaches in the perimeter wall — and by afternoon, the Hindu neighborhood was surrounded from all sides.
Local Hindus accused the Muslim-dominated administration of rampant mismanagement and bias; Bray agreed, expressing scorn over the lackaidisical response of the police machinery even in face of the talaq oath, and found the armed forces to have been complicit in looting.
Bolton found Khan's theatrical incineration of the pamphlet unwise and reiterated Bray's grievance about the failure to recognize the enormity of the talaq oath.