18 killed in train stampede to India’s religious festival

No fewer than 18 people have been confirmed dead following a stampede at a railway station in New Delhi, India’s capital, late Saturday when surging crowds scrambled to catch trains to the Kumbh Mela Hindu festival, reputed to be the world’s largest religious gathering, Indian medical officials reports.

Deputy Medical Superintendent of Lok Nayak Hospital in New Delhi, Dr Ritu Saxena, who confirmed the incident to reporters on Sunday, said the rush at the train station appeared to break out Saturday as crowds struggled to board trains for the ongoing event which will end on February 26.

“I can confirm 15 deaths at the hospital. They don’t have any open injury. Most likely died from hypoxia or maybe some blunt injury but that would only be confirmed after an autopsy,” said Dr. Saxena.

“There are also 11 others who are injured. Most of them are stable and have orthopaedic injuries,” she added.

Indian state broadcaster, NDTV also reported three more dead from the stampede, quoting an official of another hospital in the city, saying those dead were mostly women and children.

A railway worker who was interviewed reportedly said:

“I have been working as a coolie since 1981, but I never saw a crowd like this before.

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“People started colliding and fell on the escalator and stairs when platform for a special train departing for Prayagraj was suddenly shifted,” the worker said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed his anguish at the by the stampede.

“My thoughts are with all those who have lost their loved ones. I pray that the injured have a speedy recovery,” Modi wrote on X, while the governor of the capital territory Delhi, Vinai Kumar Saxena, said disaster management personnel had been told to deploy and “all hospitals are in readiness to address related exigencies.”

The six-week Kumbh Mela is the single biggest milestone on the Hindu religious calendar, and officials said around 500 million devotees have already visited the festival since it began last month.

The Kumbh Mela attracts tens of millions of Hindu faithful every 12 years to the northern city of Prayagraj, and has a history of crowd-related disasters — including one last month, when at least 30 people died in another stampede at the holy confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers.

Media reports in the Asian country say more than 400 people died after they were trampled or drowned on a single day of the festival in 1954, one of the largest tolls in a crowd-related disaster globally.

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