New Delhi, July 3 (EFE).- More than 120 people have died in a stampede caused by an estimated crowd of 250,000 devotees attending a religious ceremony in northern India, where only 80,000 attendees were expected, police said on Wednesday.
“So far, 121 people have died in the incident, and the injured are being treated,” regional Minister of State for Education Sandeep Singh told the media.
The number of the dead in the mayhem is expected to rise.
The minister promised “strict measures against those responsible for the incident.”
According to a police complaint., the crowd tripled the expected number in an open field in the Hathras district, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
According to media reports, the complaint names several organizers but does not directly mention the local guru Bhole Baba, whom tens of thousands of people had come to see in person.
The religious ceremony, a kind of prayer event organized by a self-proclaimed god-man, Bhole Baba, took place in a large open field, with the central area featuring a structure made of scaffolding and fabric to accommodate the mass of devotees.
At the end of the event, a stampede broke out, resulting in the deaths of several people, according to Manoj Kumar, the chief secretary of the Uttar Pradesh state government. More than 100 of the deceased are women.
The exact causes of the stampede are still unknown to the police. However, the district magistrate of Hathras, Ashish Kumar, told the media that the incident occurred due to the large number of people trying to leave the area simultaneously.
Eyewitnesses cited by Indian media said that several people fell into a ditch on the outskirts of the venue, causing a chain reaction that led to many being crushed to death.
Stampedes are frequent at Indian religious celebrations and are largely due to deficiencies in managing large crowds or the precarious infrastructure surrounding places of worship.
To find a deadlier stampede than Tuesday’s, one has to go back to September 2008, when at least 150 people died and another 150 were injured in a human avalanche at the entrance to a temple in the city of Jodhpur, in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. EFE
daa-ssk
