At least 30 die in stampede

AT least 30 women and children were killed and hundreds injured in a stampede when thousands of poor people scrambled for clothes being handed out in a northern Bangladesh town yesterday, police said.

People had been trying to force their way into the grounds of a rich businessman who was giving away clothes and money ahead of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr festival, a local journalist quoted a Red Crescent official as saying.

Police said two people from the businessman’s household had been arrested but gave no details. A wall and an iron gate collapsed, triggering the stampede.

“We have found the bodies of 26 women and four children. And that’s the confirmed death toll right now,” said Faridul Islam, a police official at Gaibandha, a northern town where the stampede occurred.

The unofficial death toll was earlier put at 47. United News of Bangladesh and ATN Bangla television earlier reported that 33 victims, including five children, died instantly and another 14 people succumbed to injuries on the way to hospital in Gaibandha, 120 miles north of the capital, Dhaka.

The reports said at least 200 people were injured, many of them hospitalised.

Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, who is visiting Saudi Arabia, expressed deep shock over the loss of life, sent her condolences to the victims’ families and ordered an investigation, officials said.

Gifts from rich to poor are traditional ahead of the Eid festival, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan and will be celebrated later this week.

Zobaida Khatun, 30, was in the crowd carrying her one-year-old son. Khatun tossed her son into the hands of her mother Sahera Begum before she was buried under dozens of women and children who fell on her.

Hours later Begum found her daughter’s body hidden under several other bodies.

“I saw my daughter falling on the ground and buried under the crowd,” said Begum, 50, one of the survivors.

The women were from the poor families of rickshaw-pullers and farm workers. Many of them had brought their children along to the event.

The organisers said they had wanted the crowd to stand in a line.

A similar stampede in 1989 in the south-eastern city of Chittagong killed 36.