Stampede at Hindu temple in Jodphur kills scores

Frantic Hindu devotees desperately battled to revive people trampled and crushed in a stampede at an historic temple that left at least 168 worshippers dead.

Television images taken outside the temple located in a 15th Century fort in the city of Jodhpur showed police and onlookers using blankets to carry out the injured and dead. Laying them down on the pavement, people struggled to revive those who had been hurt, pressing their chests and slapping their faces. Other victims were dragged out by the feet or arms. Small children were seen sitting next to the corpses of their parents, crying in anguish.

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Officials fear the death toll could yet reach 200. The exact cause of the stampede that left at least another 100 people injured was tonight unclear. One report said devotees panicked as rumours spread that a bomb alert had been issued at the temple. Another report said the crush occurred as people rushed forward towards the door of the temple as soon as it opened early this morning. Chaos ensued as people began jostling with each other and some slipped on the ramp, stretching for more than a mile, that leads to the temple entrance.

“Several people fell down as the floor became slippery with thousands of devotees breaking coconuts for offering at the temple,” one witness, Ramesh Vyas, told reporters.

The stampede happened at around 5.30am outside the Chamunda temple located inside the famous and sprawling Mehrangarh fort that overlooks the Rajasthan desert city about 200 miles from Delhi. Up to 25,000 people had gathered before dawn to mark the first day of Navratri, a nine-day Hindu festival of intense and sometimes feverish worship dedicated to the Mother Goddess.

Reports said the crush had happened in the line dedicated for men and that a number of those killed were young. One small child was seen crying over the lifeless body of his father, wailing: “Daddy, please get up.”

Tragically, fatal stampedes at temples in India are not an uncommon experience. Earlier this summer many children were among the 145 people killed at a crush at the Naina Devi temple in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. In 2005, about 265 pilgrims were killed in a stampede near a temple in the western state of Maharashtra.

But in recent weeks India has been rocked by a series of bomb attacks that have left dozens dead and many more anxious and nervous about further explosions. Crowded together in an area with no obvious route for escape, if rumours of a bomb alert had spread among the devotees, panic would have quickly followed.

One witness who gave his name only as Anubhav told Reuters: “People were falling over one another. Many ran but were trampled under the feet of thousands.”

The injured were rushed to a number of local hospitals, some of which were short of oxygen required to treat the injured and where dead bodies were being stacked up, according to some local news reports.

Outside the Mathura Das Mathur hospital relatives anxiously worked their way through lists of names of those admitted to the emergency room. Inside, the scenes were equally chaotic as doctors struggled to deal with the sheer number of those hurt. A senior Rajasthan official, S N Thanvi, said: “A majority of those killed died due to suffocation as a result of the stampede.”

Police insisted that they had deployed sufficient officers ahead of the festival but officials said a full inquiry would be carried out. “We will definitely conduct an inquiry,” Rajasthan's home minister Gulab Chand Kataria, told reporters. “And if we find people were negligent, we will definitely take action