Pakistan stampede kills 18 women, children: police

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Pakistan stampede kills 18 women, children: police
Pakistan - 14 september 2009

KARACHI – A stampede killed 18 women and children when charity workers handed out free flour to the needy in a crowded neighbourhood of Pakistan's financial capital Karachi on Monday, police said.

"We have talked to the officials in city hospitals who have confirmed to us that at least 18 women and children have died in the stampede and dozens others have been injured," Karachi city police chief Wasim Ahmed told reporters.

"The deaths were caused by suffocation and the stampede in one of the most congested localities of Khori Garden, where a charity was distributing free flour among hundreds of women and children during Ramadan," he added.

Muslim-majority Pakistan is observing the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, when believers fast from dawn to dusk.

Injured women and children lay on beds in a crowded hospital, where panicked relatives rushed around trying to find their loved ones and dead bodies lay covered in white sheets, television footage showed.

Ahmed told Pakistan's private Geo television station that police arrested the distributor, Chaudhry Iftikhar, in connection with the stampede, the cause of which was not immediately clear.

In April 2006, the country's worst stampede in recent history killed 29 women and children at a religious gathering to mark the anniversary of the Prophet Mohammed's birth in Karachi.

Officials said the stampede happened when a girl fell down the stairs as women left the gathering that was organised by Dawat-i-Islami, a moderate Sunni Muslim party, at its Faizan-e-Madina mosque in the city's eastern district.


Source: AFP