htaccess in root conflicts with that of wordpress

[abduraooft]

Hi all,

I've an htaccess in root like

RewriteEngine On

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

to handle all requests in index.php of root directory.

There is a wordpress module inside the /events directory, which has another htaccess like

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /events/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /events/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Everything is fine if I make requests like http://www.example.com/events/ (with a trailing slash), but I get 500 Error - Internal Server Error when I try to access the page like http://www.example.com/events (with no slash at the end)

What could be the reason? Can I write another rule to tell the system to consider /events like /events/?

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Edit: I removed the forced www rule for the time being