Kerala stampede toll rises to 104

Agencies/Thiruvananthapuram

The Friday evening tragedy unfolded in a remote, mountainous area of the southern state as thousands of Hindu pilgrims made their way home after watching a celestial light, a trick allegedly played by the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB).

The annual event at the hill shrine of Sabarimala draws 3 to 4mn people each year.

Police said almost all bodies of the victims were identified by friends and relatives and some 40 people including children are still in hospitals with serious injuries.

Kerala Home Secretary Jaya Kumar said 104 people had been confirmed dead and dozens more injured, some of them seriously. The state government ordered a judicial probe into the incident.

The tragedy struck at Pullumedu at around 8.30 pm when a packed jeep lost control and ploughed into a crowd of devotees packed onto a narrow road in a hilly and densely forested area 10km from the temple.

"The accident caused a mass panic and triggered a stampede on the hillside,” said Special Police Commissioner Rajendra Nair.

The search for bodies and survivors was hampered by the remote location, heavy mist and the thick forest terrain.

Television networks showed pictures of casualties being passed over the heads of tightly packed crowds of pilgrims in a rescue effort that stretched deep into the night.

Defence Minister A K Antony called the incident "a tragedy beyond anyone’s imagination” and the Southern Naval Command dispatched an emergency medical team to the accident site.

The stampede occurred on the final day of the pilgrimage at the Sabarimala shrine, located in Idukki district, about 200km from the Kerala state capital Thiruvananthapuram.

The governor of Kerala, a popular holiday destination and spice-growing region with sandy beaches and lush green mountains, said he was "shocked and saddened” at the loss of life.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said his thoughts were with the relatives of the victims and announced compensation payments of Rs100,000 each of the families of those killed.

Anxious pilgrims with missing relatives thronged local hospitals yesterday, as officials tried to identify the bodies brought down from the stampede site.

Most of the victims were from the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

"It is an unfortunate incident. The prime minister has called us and assured that all measures will be taken. My government will decide on a suitable compensation amount,” Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan told CNN-IBN.

Under the customs of the pilgrimage, hundreds of thousands of men and women set off on foot in groups for the Sabarimala temple, each carrying a cloth bundle containing traditional offerings.

But many of the elderly, or those short of time, opt to cram into overloaded buses and jeeps to travel as close as possible to the temple, which is believed to be where the god Ayyappa meditated.

The temple is packed with devotees throughout the pilgrimage season from November to January.

This was another black Friday for Kerala. Two major rail tragedies that shook the state in the past also happened on Fridays.

A total of 107 passengers of the Bangalore-Thiruvananthapuram Island Express met with watery grave as the train fell off Perumon bridge across the Ashatamudi lake in Kollam district on July 8, 1988.

On June 21, 2001, the Chennai-Mangalore express derailed at Kadalundi bridge near Kozhikode claiming 52 lives.

It is the second time in recent memory that the festival has been struck by disaster. In 1999 more than 50 Hindu devotees died after a landslide on a crowded hillside at the site.

In March last year, police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh blamed lax safety for the deaths of 63 people - all of them women and children - in a stampede outside another Hindu temple.

At least another 10 people died in a stampede at a temple in Bihar in October.

Stampedes at public events in India are common as large numbers of people crowd into congested areas. Few safety regulations and absent or inadequate policing mean panic can spread quickly with deadly consequences.

The spark is often an accident but occasionally simply a rumour about a bomb or attack leads to a crush. Women and children frequently make up the majority of the victims.