INDIA:AT LEAST 145 people, mostly women and children, were crushed to death in a stampede at a Hindu temple in the Himalayas in northern India yesterday.
Confirming the fatalities, senior state police officer Daljit Singh Minhas said the iron railing leading to the ancient Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh province broke, leading to the stampede in which another 80 were injured.
More than 50,000 devotees, a number larger than anticipated, were at the temple on the second day of the annual nine-day Hindu festival when the tragedy occurred.
Police told television news channels shortly after the incident, which took place 160km (100 miles) from the provincial capital, Shimla, that the dead included 38 women and 30 children.
They said the serpentine queues of worshippers waiting to make offerings to the Hindu goddess Naina Devi inside the temple's inner sanctum reportedly panicked once news of the broken railing spread.
This led to chaos.
The majority of victims died of suffocation, police said.
A large number of victims were from neighbouring Punjab state, from where additional police and rescue teams rushed to the temple to carry out relief and rescue work in rainy, monsoon conditions.
Survivors of the stampede said the meagre police force present at the shrine was more concerned with "slapping and baton-charging people" than bringing the situation under control.
"I was slapped by a policeman when I sought his help following the stampede," said Bali Singh, a devotee from Fatehabad in nearby Haryana state who lost two daughters in the tragedy.
"Then other policemen joined in, making things worse."
Had the police helped people, the number of casualties would not have been so high, the distraught and inconsolable father declared.
Meanwhile, weeping relatives identified the bodies of the deceased as overburdened staff from a nearby government hospital completed legal and postmortem formalities.
State chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal said an inquiry would be conducted into allegations that inadequate police were deployed at the temple.
It would also look into allegations that the police used force against devotees after the stampede, he said.
Similar temple stampedes have been common occurrences on previous occasions across India during religious festivals that are attended by millions of worshippers.
Six people died in one such stampede at a well-attended Hindu festival in eastern Orissa state in July, where more than one million worshippers had gathered in the coastal town of Puri for the annual celebrations.
Also, in March, nine devotees were killed at another religious gathering in central India when a railing broke at the temple premises and triggered chaos.
Three years ago, 257 people died in yet another stampede during a Hindu pilgrimage in Satara district in western India.