LUCKNOW: At least 116 people were crushed to death at an overcrowded Hindu religious gathering in northern India on Tuesday, government officials said, the worst such tragedy in more than a decade. A large crowd had gathered for a sermon by a popular preacher near the northern Indian city of Hathras, but as they were leaving, a fierce dust storm sparked panic.

Many were crushed or trampled, falling on top of each other, with some collapsing into a roadside drain in the chaos. “The attendees were exiting the venue when a dust storm blinded their vision, leading to a melee and the subsequent tragic incident,” said Chaitra V, divisional commissioner of

Aligarh city in Uttar Pradesh state, told AFP. “We... are focusing on providing relief and medical aid for the victims,” she added.

Senior police officer Shalabh Mathur said that it appeared “more people had come than permission was asked for”. Several hours after the crush, Chaitra said that “the death toll stands at 116”, with at least 18 others injured. Most of the dead were women, according to state chief medical officer Umesh Kumar Tripathi. Deadly incidents are common at places of worship during major religious festivals in India, the biggest of which prompt millions of devotees to make pilgrimages to holy sites.

Lines of ambulances rushed the injured to hospitals. Wailing women and crying men gathered outside one mortuary in the town of Etah, where many of the dead were taken, seeking news of their relatives. “When the sermon finished, everyone started running out,” Shakuntala, a woman who gave only one name, told the Press Trust of India news agency. “People fell in a drain by the road. They started falling one on top of the other and got crushed to death.”

Video clips showed bodies piled into the back of trucks and laid out in vehicles. Purses and bags covered in dust, were heaped up at the venue, with people sitting on their haunches sifting through them to identify their belongings. Mobile phones were similarly piled together, waiting to be claimed by their owners.

A video on social media showed a large crowd packed into a tented area, standing and listening to devotional tunes as they waved their hands in the direction of the religious leader who sat on a stage. It also showed some women hanging onto the bamboo poles holding up the canopy to get a better view above the heads of the large crowd.

“There must have been about 50,000 people...at the gate on the highway, some people were going left and some people were going right, the stampede was caused in that confusion,” Suresh Chandra, a witness who was at the gathering, told local media. Seema, a woman who traveled from a town almost 60 km away to attend the event, said she was leaving the venue when the stampede occurred. She was accompanied by three relatives, two of whom were killed.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced compensation of $2,400 to the next of kin of those who died and $600 to those injured in the “tragic incident”. “My condolences are with those who have lost their loved ones... I wish for the speedy recovery of all the injured,” Modi wrote on social media platform X. President Droupadi Murmu said the deaths were “heart-rending” and offered her “deepest condolences”. Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh chief minister who is also a Hindu monk, expressed his condolences to the relatives of those killed and ordered an investigation into the deaths, his office said.

Religious gatherings in India have a grim track record of deadly incidents caused by poor crowd management and safety lapses. At least 112 people were killed in 2016 after a huge explosion caused by a banned fireworks display at a temple marking the Hindu new year. The blast ripped through concrete buildings and ignited a fire at a temple complex in Kerala state, where thousands had gathered.

Another 115 devotees were killed in 2013 in a stampede at a bridge near a temple in Madhya Pradesh. Up to 400,000 people were gathered in the area and the stampede began after a rumor spread that the bridge was about to collapse. In 2008, 224 pilgrims were killed and more than 400 were injured in a stampede at a hilltop temple in the northern city of Jodhpur. – Agencies