Nearly 150 Hindu worshippers dead in India temple stampede: police
Güncelleme Tarihi:
Close to 150 Hindu worshippers, including scores of children, are confirmed to have died at a temple in northern India in the worst stampede in the country in three years, police said Monday.
Tens of thousands of people had thronged to the Naina Devi shrine in Himachal Pradesh state to attend week-long religious festivities when the rumor of a landslide triggered panic among devotees on Sunday.
"The death toll as of now is 148, and 48 people are injured," a police spokesman said early Monday.
Police started hitting devotees with batons to control the commotion, but this only created further panic, witnesses said.
"People started pushing their way back and many women and children fell down. Whoever fell down was trampled upon by the surge of devotees," Mohni Singh, a local television journalist who was present at the site, told AFP.
The bodies of devotees were strewn along the steep four-kilometer (2.5-mile) path leading up to the temple, located about 150 kilometers from the state capital Shimla, witnesses said late Sunday.
Around 50 people with minor injuries were Monday receiving treatment at a hospital in neighboring
Punjabs chief minister, Prakash Singh Badal, announced the next of kin of the dead would receive 100,000 rupees (2,400 dollars) in compensation.
Despite the huge loss of life, officials said the pilgrimage was continuing only hours after the bodies were cleared.
The temple, devoted to goddess Naina Devi, is located at a hilltop in the
The shrine has been the site of previous deadly accidents.
In the early 1980s, more than 50 people died in a similar stampede. After that incident, authorities constructed separate passages for entry and exit.
Six people died in similar circumstances at a popular Hindu festival in July in the eastern state of Orissa, where about one million people had gathered in the town of
In March, nine people were killed and many more injured at a religious gathering in central
In one of