The stampede in which at least 121 people died at a religious event in northern India It occurred when several of the 250,000 attendees They tried to approach the local guru Bhole Baba, This caused many of them to fall down a slippery slope and be trampled, official sources said on Wednesday.

“I spoke to several witnesses and they informed me that the incident occurred at the end of the event. When the guru was leaving the stage, Several women began to approach him to touch him, But security stopped them and the accident occurred,” Yogi Adityanath, the head of the government of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, told a press conference on Wednesday.

The death toll has increased this Wednesday to 121while 31 injured people remain under treatment in various hospitals, although “out of danger“, Adityanath said. Sikandra Rao Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) Ravindra Kumar said in a report that devotees who tried to approach the guru were met with jostling by the event’s private security, which led to further jostling by other attendees who wanted to move forward and set off chaos.

Kumar has claimed that he was one of the attendees and said in his report, reported by the Indian Express newspaper, that Many devotees began to flee desperately. towards the side of the vacant lot where the religious ceremony was held yesterday in the Hathras district. At that moment, he added, several of those fleeing fell down a slippery slope that connected the vacant lot to the road and were unable to get up after being trampled by other worshippers who were following the same path.

The Uttar Pradesh chief minister said an investigation was underway to determine the cause and accused the organisers of covering up the accident by “trying to suppress several details”. He also said that the event’s private security did not allow regional authorities access.

Triple the expected number of attendees

Nearly 250,000 people attended the ceremony, according to the complaint filed against the organization, a figure that triples the expected number of attendees at the event, which was permit to accommodate around 80,000 people. However, the complaint does not mention Bhole Baba, according to Indian media. Stampedes and avalanches are frequent phenomena during Indian religious celebrations and are largely due to deficiencies in the management of mass gatherings or the precariousness of the infrastructure surrounding places of worship.

However, to find a more deadly stampede than the one on Tuesday, we have to go back to September 2008, when at least 150 people died and another 150 were injured.s in a human stampede at the entrance to a temple in the city of Jodhpur, in the western Indian state of Rajasthan.