Moments before deadly stampede at India's Maha Kumbh, devotees pleaded to open more routes
PRAYAGRAJ, India — Moments before a deadly stampede at the world's biggest religious gathering in India, Hindu devotees queuing to take a spiritual bath in a river said they pleaded with police to open barricaded routes to thin out a surging crowd.
Police did not respond, they said, and soon people squeezed in the massive crowd began fainting, creating panic at the Maha Kumbh Mela Hindu festival in the northern city of Prayagraj.
"People were asking police to open the barricades to other routes as it was suffocating to stand there in that crowd for almost an hour. We couldn't breathe," Jagwanti Devi, who was in the crowd with her family of six, said on Thursday (Jan 30).
"Then suddenly my mother fainted, and some other elderly people also fainted, which created a commotion. We fell down and many people stepped over us," said Devi, wailing next to the bodies of her mother and sister-in-law at a city mortuary.
At least 30 people died in the stampede that broke just after midnight on Wednesday, according to official data, but authorities speaking on condition of anonymity at the mortuary said the death toll was nearly double at more than 50.
A Reuters witness counted at least 39 bodies inside the morgue late Wednesday afternoon, by when some bodies had been handed over to relatives, but police said the excess bodies were unrelated deaths.
80 million crowd unexpected
Vaibhav Krishna, a deputy inspector general at the festival, and two other officers, said the crowd of 80 million was four times larger than the expected size and all the devotees wanted to go to the main bathing area at the confluence of three rivers rather than spreading out.
The first alert on police systems of a crowd surge came an hour before midnight on