The deadly stampede at the Hindu Kumbh Mela festival, the world’s largest religious gathering in India, left at least 40 people dead and many others injured on Wednesday, police sources told Reuters.
Bodies were still being brought to the local Moti Lal Nehru Medical College hospital morgue more than 12 hours after the tragedy at the world’s biggest gathering of humanity, though the government was yet to officially announce the casualty numbers.
“More bodies are coming in. We have nearly 40 bodies here. We are transferring them out as well and handing over to families one by one,” one of the sources said.
Senior police officer Vaibhav Krishna, when contacted for comment, said police could not give the official numbers because they were busy with crowd management.
Distraught relatives queued up to identify those killed by the stampede, which occurred when crowds surged towards the confluence of three rivers, where immersion is considered particularly sacred.
Some witnesses spoke of a huge push that caused devotees to fall on each other, while others said closure of routes to the water brought the dense crowd to a standstill and caused people to collapse due to suffocation.
“There was commotion, everybody started pushing, pulling, climbing over one another. My mother collapsed…then my sister-in-law. People ran over them,” said Jagwanti Devi, 40, as she sat in an ambulance with the bodies of her relatives.
An official at Prayagraj’s SRN Hospital, where some of the injured were taken, said those who died had either suffered heart attacks or had comorbidities like diabetes.
“People came in with fractures, broken bones…Some collapsed on the spot and were brought dead,” said the official, who did not want to be named.
