Hundreds die in stampede, fire in Mumbai, India

Stampede kills at least 300 in India during a religious procession. Pilgrims angered by the accidental deaths of several people inside a Hindu temple set fire to shops along a crowded walkway outside Tuesday, triggering a stampede that killed more than 250 people, police said. An estimated 300,000 people had gathered for a festival in and around the hilltop Mandra Devi temple in western India near the small town of Wai, about 100 miles southeast of Bombay. Witnesses said the stampede started around midday, after pilgrims slipped on the temple’s steep stone steps, which had become wet after coconuts were broken as an offering to the local deity Kalubai.

“A couple of devotees slipped and fell on the floor. A mob from behind walked over them,” Police chief Chandrakant Kumbhar said. “When their relatives, who were still climbing the stairs, heard the news, they became angry and set fire to some shops.” “People were running down the hill — it was madness,” said Vijay Wankhede, who has a small shop near the temple, squinting and coughing as smoke spewed from the gutted shell of his home and shop. “There was no place to keep the bodies,” said Sanjay Mete, who sells flowers and offerings near the temple. “There were so many bodies that we stacked one body on top of another.”

A short-circuit in an overhead power cable then sparked a fire in makeshift stalls selling flowers, sweets, and food, causing cooking gas cylinders to explode, officials said. The 300-year-old temple is popular among lower-caste Hindus who undertake the annual pilgrimage on a full-moon day in January and participate in a 24-hour festival that includes ritual animal sacrifices to the goddess. The 2-foot-high idol of the goddess Mandra Devi inside the temple was shrouded in smoke and the iron gates of the temple were shut after police removed the bodies from the complex.

In August, at least 39 Hindus were killed when pilgrims stampeded on the banks of a holy river in the town of Nasik, 110 miles northeast of Bombay. Fifty-one pilgrims died in 1999 after a rope meant to channel worshippers snapped in a landslide at a Hindu shrine in southern India, while 50 people were killed in 1986 in a stampede in the northern town of Haridwar. In the worst accident, about 800 pilgrims died during a Hindu festival in 1954 in the northern city of Allahabad.