Police launch criminal investigation of Indian temple stampede as families grieve

Police investigate deadly Indian temple stampede

KUNDA, India — Organizers of a food and clothing giveaway in India that collapsed into a deadly stampede failed to take adequate measures to ensure the safety of thousands of poor villagers, officials said Friday as relatives buried some of the 63 victims.

Most of those killed were women and children who were crushed as people scrambled for the free items Thursday at a Hindu temple in the small town of Kunda, on the northern plains of India’s Uttar Pradesh state.

Police opened a criminal negligence case against the temple management, Superintendent of Police S.M. Mishra said. Relatives complained organizers should have done a better job of controlling the crowds. Ashok Kumar, a local government official, said the temple had not asked permission to hold the event.

But Rajnish Puri, a spokesman for the Jagat Kripalu Parishat trust that runs the temple, said he had informed local authorities about the event last Saturday, telling them they expected large numbers of people.

“But only two police constables were sent,” he said in a statement.

In the nearby village of Kazipur Maharajganj, grieving relatives chanted religious hymns as they accompanied the family of 48-year-old Phool Chand Saroj, a poor farmer who lost his mother and two children in the stampede. Saroj’s wife, who he believed had also died, was found to be alive overnight.

The bodies were carried to nearby fields for burial. While most Hindus cremate their dead, the villagers in this area traditionally bury them.

In the village of Piranagar, the bodies of two sisters, 8-year-old Vandana and 12-year-old Sanjana, were wrapped in white sheets and placed on slabs of ice in their small house until their father could return home later Friday from his job ironing clothes in the distant city of Mumbai.

Their mother, Bimla Devi, cried nearby among weeping relatives and neighbors. The girls had gone to the temple along with their mother and their 15-year-old sister Khushboo.

“We knew that we would get an offering so we went,” Khushboo said. “Then we felt people starting to push us, and people started falling on top of us. In this madness, my two sisters died.”

The handouts in Kunda are an annual tradition arranged by local religious leader Kripalu Maharaj to mark the anniversary of his wife’s death, a common practice in India.

The event usually draws a few hundred people, but was announced more broadly this year and attracted several thousand villagers, said state lawmaker Raghuraj Pratap Singh, who represents Kunda, about 110 miles (180 kilometers) southeast of the state capital of Lucknow.

While most men in the farming region worked in their fields, women gathered with their children to receive the alms.

The stampede was so intense it knocked down a gate at the compound surrounding the temple.

The compound appeared to have been undergoing renovations. Bamboo and iron rods used in construction were strewn about the grounds, possibly causing some people to trip.

All the victims have been identified and the bodies given to relatives to carry to their villages, police official K.G. Khan said. As bodies were claimed, temple officials at the hospital gave donations of 10,000 rupees ($220) to families who lost relatives.

Deadly stampedes are relatively common at temples in India, where large crowds — sometimes hundreds of thousands of people — gather in tiny areas with no safety measures or crowd control. In 2008, more than 145 people died in a stampede at a remote Hindu temple at the foothills of the Himalayas.

Associated Press reporter Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow contributed to this story.