Severe overcrowding and a lack of exits contributed to a stampede at a religious festival in northern India, authorities said yesterday, leaving at least 121 people dead as the faithful surged toward the preacher to touch him and chaos ensued.
Five died yesterday morning and 28 people were still being treated in a hospital, local official Manish Chaudhry said.
Deadly stampedes are relatively common at Indian religious festivals, where large crowds gather in small areas with shoddy infrastructure and few safety measures.
Photo: AFP
About a quarter of a million people turned up for the event on Tuesday that was permitted to accommodate only 80,000. It is not clear how many made it inside the giant tent set up in a muddy field in a village in Hathras District in Uttar Pradesh.
It was also not clear what sparked the panic.
However, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath told reporters that a crowd rushed toward the preacher to touch him as he was descending from the stage and volunteers struggled to intervene.
An initial report from the police suggested that thousands of people then thronged the exits and many slipped on the muddy ground, causing them to fall and be crushed in the crowd.
Most of the dead were women.
The chaos also appeared to continue outside the tent, as followers again ran toward the preacher, a Hindu guru known locally as Bhole Baba, as he left in a vehicle. His security personnel pushed the crowd back, causing more people to fall, officials said.
Authorities are investigating and searching for the preacher as well as other organizers, whose whereabouts were not known.
Adityanath said he ordered an inquiry by a retired judge into the deaths.
Indian police registered a case of culpable homicide against two organizers, but excluded the preacher. Culpable homicide carries a maximum punishment of life imprisonment in India.
Binod Sokhna, who lost his mother, daughter and wife, wept as he walked out of a morgue yesterday.
“My son called me and said: ‘Papa, Mother is no more. Come here immediately.’ My wife is no more,” he said.
Followers of the guru from across the state — which is India’s most populous with more than 200 million people — traveled to the village, with rows of parked vehicles stretching 3km.
State official Ashish Kumar said there were insufficient exits in the vast tent.
It is not clear how many exits there were.
Experts said the event violated safety norms.
“The function was held in a makeshift tent without ensuring multiple exit routes,” disaster management expert Sanjay Srivastava said.
On Tuesday, hundreds of relatives had gathered at local hospitals, wailing in distress at the sight of the dead, placed on stretchers and covered in white sheets on the grounds outside. Buses and trucks also carried dozens of victims to morgues.
Sonu Kumar was one of many local residents who helped lift and move dead bodies after the disaster. He criticized the preacher.
“He sat in his car and left. And his devotees here fell one upon another,” Sonu Kumar said.
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