At least 17 dead in crush at Durga Puja festival in Kolkata

At least 17 people have died and many more were injured in a crush during Durga Puja celebrations in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, officials have said.

Suvendhu Adhikari, who leads the West Bengal state government, said the victims included a girl aged seven, with 25 other people under medical care for injuries sustained in the crush. By his latest count, six of those killed had been formally identified, with work ongoing to confirm the rest.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the incident as “tragic” and said the state government was providing support to the families of those affected.

According to witnesses, the crush developed after sudden rainfall swept over the crowded festival site, sending people scrambling for shelter. Speaking to the news agency AFP, a senior police officer said an announcement over the public address system caused “commotion” the moment the rain started, with the crowd “pushing, pulling and rushing forward” before falling and triggering the crush.

Durga Puja is one of the most widely celebrated festivals in Hinduism, honouring the goddess Durga, and events marking it routinely draw enormous crowds to temporary pavilions and street gatherings across West Bengal, with Kolkata’s celebrations among the largest anywhere in India.

Deadly crushes at large public and religious gatherings are a recurring problem in the country, frequently blamed on poor crowd management and a lack of adequate safety measures for the scale of people involved. Two years ago, a crush at a Hindu religious gathering in Uttar Pradesh killed 121 people, one of the worst such disasters in recent memory.

The injured from Saturday’s incident were taken for treatment at nearby hospitals as authorities worked through the night to establish a fuller account of exactly what happened, how the crowd came to panic so quickly, and how the casualty toll rose in the aftermath.

Source: BBC News