January 26, 2005
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Up to 300 Hindu pilgrims are feared dead and hundreds injured during a stampede at a Hindu festival in India.
The stampede happened during a pilgrimage to the remote Mandhar Devi temple.
Officials say thousands panicked during a religious procession after a fire broke out in roadside stalls.
Many pilgrims were crushed and burned to death as the fire forced crowds into a narrow stairway leading to the hilltop temple.
The stampede occurred near the village of Wai, more than 200km (125 miles) south of Mumbai (Bombay), where pilgrims congregate every year at the temple to venerate a Hindu goddess.
This year more than 300,000 people had gathered, and the narrow path leading to the temple was jammed with worshippers, many of them women and children.
Crushed and charred
Accounts vary as to what caused the stampede. One local police inspector blamed a fire caused by an electrical short circuit in a makeshift shop.
Other witnesses said pilgrims began burning and looting roadside stalls after they became frustrated at long delays in gaining entry to the temple site.
In the centre, bodies were being recovered amid the figures of Hindu gods.
The procession quickly became panicked and the narrow passage was jammed as crowds surged forward to avoid the flames.
A local police chief, V N Deshmukh, put the death toll at more than 300 and said that more than 200 were taken by bus to local hospitals, the AFP news agency reported.
“This does not include the people who may have been charred to death in the shops that have gutted nearby in the fire.”
Difficult to police
Stampedes are not uncommon at Hindu religious festivals, which often attract millions of worshippers and are notoriously difficult to police.
The event at Wai takes place every year during the night of a full moon.
Pilgrims started arriving on Monday, ahead of the full moon on Tuesday night.
At least 39 people died in August 2003 when devotees panicked on the banks of a holy river 175km north-east of Bombay.
In 1999, 51 pilgrims died when a safety rope snapped at a Hindu shrine in southern India, and 50 were killed in 1986 in a stampede in the northern town of Haridwar.
In 1954, some 800 are thought to have died in the northern city of Allahabad – the worst such incident recorded.
