More than 100 killed in stampede at religious event in India

New Delhi — At least 116 people, many of them women and children, were killed in a stampede at a Hindu religious gathering in northern India on Tuesday, authorities said, in one of the country’s worst such tragedies in years.

The stampede happened in a village in Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh, about 200km southeast of the capital New Delhi, where authorities said thousands had gathered in the late afternoon heat.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the federal government was assisting the state and announced a compensation of 200,000 rupees ($2,400) to the families of the dead and 50,000 rupees to those injured.

The stampede occurred when a crowd of devotees started pushing towards the stage after the event, said Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

While the cause was not immediately clear, Hathras district administrator Ashish Kumar suggested it may have been “due to overcrowding at the time when people were trying to leave the venue”.

Police said they had launched an investigation and promised action against anyone found to be responsible, adding that the gathering may have been larger than had been permitted.

“Lapses by authorities will also be investigated and action will be taken on the basis of the report which will be available within 24 hours,” state police chief Prashant Kumar said.

Video clips recorded by news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority stake, showed bodies piled into the back of trucks and laid out in vehicles.

“There must have been about 50,000 people ... at the gate on the highway, some people were going left and some people were going right, the stampede was caused in that confusion,” Suresh Chandra, a witness who was at the gathering, told local media.

Seema, a woman who travelled from a town almost 60km away to attend the event, said she was leaving the venue when the stampede occurred. She was accompanied by three relatives, two of whom were killed.

Stampedes and other accidents involving large crowds at religious gatherings and pilgrimage sites have happened in the past and are often blamed on poor crowd management.

A stampede in central India in 2013 killed 115 people, while nearly 250 died in 2008 and more than 340 were killed during an annual pilgrimage in the western state of Maharashtra in 2005, according to local media reports.

Reuters