A second crush 3km away claimed 7 lives

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Hours after a stampede killed an estimated 30 people at the nose of the Sangam at the Maha Kumbh, there was another stampede-like situation that led to the deaths of at least seven people, including a child, according to Kalpvasi police station circle officer Rudra Kumar Singh.

This incident occurred at Jhusi, along the ghat about three kilometres away from the Sangam nose, Singh said. “Seven people were found dead at the spot at Jhusi due to excessive crowd pressure,” the circle officer told HT.

Strangely, the state administration chose to remain silent about this incident, even during the briefing on the first stampede at 7pm on Wednesday, by district magistrate Mahakumbh Nagar Vijay Kiran Anand and mela DIG Vaibhav Krishna, during which they admitted that 30 people had died in a stampede at the nose of the Sangam between 1am and 2am on Wednesday.

Despite calls and messages by HT about the second stampede, Anand and Krishna did not respond.

According to eyewitnesses, it was around 6am on Wednesday morning that devotees returning from a bath at the nearest ghat in Sector 18 were moving towards Jhusi to exit the mela, when their path clashed with another group of pilgrims moving in the opposite direction.

The crowd kept building up for hours, as people from two directions joined the melee.

One of the eyewitnesses, Suresh Bind, who works at the Mukti Marg electric substation in the area, said that there was chaos for nearly 35 minutes a little before 2pm as the crowd was so heavy that there was no room to manoeuvre. “The crowd stormed into the substation in a bid to get out of the area, and a lot of the equipment, tables, tin sheets etc. were damaged. The 400KVA transformer had to be shut down so that no one is electrocuted.”

The crush led to seven devotees, including three women and a three-year-old child, losing their lives, while over a dozen pilgrims were critically injured. The bodies were lying at the gate of the substation, Bind said.

The station house officer (SHO) of the Kalpvasi police station, Ajab Singh, said they received information of the incident around 2pm on Wednesday.

According to the SHO, he and some police personnel arrived at the scene on Wednesday afternoon.

“As they tried to clear the bottleneck, some devotees informed us that a few people had fallen amid the crowd, unable to get up. I called ambulances and got the injured shifted to a hospital. I have no idea what happened to the injured.”

According to Rudra Kumar Singh, the home towns of the deceased were determined but there was still a lack of clarity about their names. The official added that the bodies would be handed over to their relatives once they were identified.

Wednesday marked Mauni Amawasya, the new moon day considered one of the holiest of the nearly two-month-long mela. According to figures provided by the state government, an estimated 76.5 million people took a dip in the holy confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati rivers on this day.

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