At least 116 killed in stampede at Hindu religious event in India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -- At least 116 people, many of them women and children, were killed in a stampede at a Hindu religious gathering in north India on Tuesday, authorities said, in one of the country's worst such tragedies in years.

The stampede happened in a village in the Hathras district, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) southeast of the national capital, New Delhi, where authorities said thousands had gathered in sweltering late-afternoon temperatures.

"The incident happened due to overcrowding at the time when people were trying to leave the venue," Ashish Kumar, administrator of the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, told reporters.

Chaitra V., another senior state official, told broadcaster India Today that people may have lost their footing as they sought water in the heat.

"There was wet mud at one place where people may have slipped. Also because of the heat, people may have made their way to the spot where water was kept, and that could have caused the incident as well," she said.

Video clips recorded by news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority stake, showed bodies piled into the back of trucks and laid out in vehicles.

Purses and bags covered in dust were heaped up at the venue, with people sitting on their haunches sifting through them to identify their belongings.

Mobile phones were similarly piled together, waiting to be claimed by their owners.

A video on social media showed a large crowd packed into a tented area, standing and listening to devotional tunes as they waved their hands in the direction of the religious leader who sat on a stage.

It also showed some women hanging on to the bamboo poles holding up the canopy to get a better view above the heads of the large crowd.

R