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At least 121 people, most of them women and children, were killed in a crowd crush at a religious event in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday.
Nearly 80 devotees were also injured in the stampede that occurred at a satsang, or religious gathering, in Hathras, about 200km southeast of New Delhi, at about 3.30pm local time, police said.
A preliminary investigation found that thousands more than expected turned up at the event and as it got over, hundreds attempted to collect the soil the religious preacher had walked on before he left the venue, The Indian Express reported.
Manoj Kumar Singh, a senior state official, said 72 of the deceased had been identified so far. “No person is missing.”
Bodies of the victims who were yet to be identified lay on blocks of ice inside a government hospital in Hathras, India Today reported.
Scores of relatives of the victims were gathered outside the hospital waiting to take the remains home.
Mr Singh said around 80,000 people were expected at the event but “many more arrived, breaching the limit”.
The Associated Press reported that the organisers had permission for only 5,000 people to attend the event, which was held in a tent. But, according to Reuters, nearly 250,000 people eventually gathered.
“I am told people rushed to touch his feet and tried to collect soil from where he walked and a stampede took place,” Mr Singh said, referring to the religious preacher. “Many people fell into a nearby drain.”
State authorities said even though the event had permission to go ahead from local law enforcement, a committee had been set up to investigate “if arrangements inside the venue were done properly or not”.
Uttar Pradesh’s police chief, Prashant Kumar, said “the organisers did not follow the conditions imposed” by the authorities for the programme, The Indian Express reported.
Several eyewitnesses described scenes of horror as the stampede began. One witness identified only as Shakuntala by the Press Trust of India said “people started falling one upon another, one upon another”.
“Those who were crushed died. People there pulled them out,” she said.
Vijay Singh, 45, from Agra told The Guardian that the “scenes were unbelievably horrific”.
His sister-in-law was among the victims. She was pushed into a ditch after the family were separated. “My wife said the crowd was pushing each other because they were struggling to breathe. My sister-in-law fell in the ditch and due to the violent pushing many others fell in the ditch.”
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced ex gratia relief of Rs200,000 (£1,887) each to the kin of the dead and Rs50,000 (£472) for the injured.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath was likely to visit Hathras on Wednesday.
“Our government will get to the bottom of this and give appropriate punishment to the conspirators and those responsible. The state government is investigating this entire incident. We will see whether it is an accident or a conspiracy,” he said on Tuesday.
Among those under the police scanner was the preacher, Suraj Pal Singh, 58, known by his followers as “Bhole Baba”. A former state police constable, he renamed himself Narayan Sakar Vishwa Hari or Bhole Baba after quitting the force in the 1990s.
Police were trying to ascertain his whereabouts, ANI news agency reported.
Opposition members blamed state and federal governments, both run by Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, for the tragedy. “Look what happened and how many people have lost their lives. Will anyone be accountable?” Rajesh Kumar Jha, a member of parliament, asked.
He said the stampede resulted from an administrative failure to manage large crowds and warned that “people will keep on dying” if authorities did not take safety protocols seriously enough.
“Every year, these kinds of incidents keep repeating themselves, and we learn nothing,” Manoj Kumar Jha, another MP, told The New York Times. “Both the state and federal governments have failed to develop a sensitive approach toward crowd management. As a nation we are good at drawing crowds but not good at managing them.”
In 2013, at least 115 people died in a crowd crush at a temple in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. In a similar incident two years earlier, more than 100 devotees were killed in a stampede at a religious festival in the southern state of Kerala.
More recently in early 2022, at least 12 people died and more were injured in a stampede at the Vaishno Devi temple in Jammu and Kashmir after a crowd of devotees tried to enter the shrine through a narrow entrance.
Additional reporting by agencies.
