INDIA:AT LEAST 150 people were killed in a stampede at a Hindu temple in India's western Rajasthan state early yesterday in what has become a frequent occurrence across the country.
Officials said the disaster in which more than 150 other people were injured, many of them seriously, happened after a wall collapsed as some 25,000 Hindu worshippers struggled to reach the 15th century Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur's hilltop Mehrangarh Fort through a narrow passageway.
The devotees were gathered before dawn to mark the start of Navaratri, a popular nine-day Hindu festival akin to Lent.
"People were falling over one another. Many ran but were trampled, and remain buried. We are pulling them out," local official Kiran Soni Gupta said.
Police said the majority of victims were trampled alive, similar to other temple crushes during religious festivities in India where crowd control is often rudimentary or non-existent.
"People walking up were crushed under the weight of those falling down on them," state home minister G C Kataria said.
This was the fourth such incident this year.
The last one, in which 145 Hindu worshippers died, occurred a few weeks ago at a hilltop temple in Himachal Pradesh in the north, triggered by rumours of an impending landslide.
Officials in Jodhpur indicated that the majority of those who had died yesterday were males, as the stampede took place in the men's section of the two parallel paths which the authorities had laid up the precipitous slope to the temple.
"There were at least 10,000 people waiting to enter the temple when the accident occurred . . . There was complete chaos," a young man, Sharat Kumar, said.
According to some eyewitness accounts, a rumour of a bomb being planted in the temple prompted the stampede among thousands of worshippers lined up to offer prayers.
A wave of bombings, including one in May in the state capital Jaipur - 241km (150 miles) to the east, had claimed nearly 200 lives over the past four months, heightening the general level of nervousness in public places.
"We were standing in line to get inside the temple when suddenly there was a commotion," factory worker Ajay Kumar, who was brought to hospital unconscious, said. "I was pushed on to the ground . . . I woke up in hospital," he added.
Television footage showed chaotic scenes in which scores of devotees carried limp bodies to police vehicles while others tried desperately to resuscitate relatives and loved ones.
Hospitals in the area, ill-equipped for such an emergency, struggled to cope with the injured as scores of people scrambled to scan lists of those admitted for treatment or sent to the morgue.
Two months earlier, six people were similarly trampled at the annual celebrations in the coastal town of Puri in eastern Orissa state, which were attended by over one million devotees.