About 250,000 people had gathered at the Hindu religious congregation in northern India where 121 people died in a crowd crush, triple the capacity permitted by authorities, a police report has said.
The deadly crush took place at a religious function known as a satsang held in a village in Hathras, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, on Tuesday when hundreds of thousands of devotee turned up to see Bhole Baba, a popular self-styled guru.
According to authorities, the scale of the crowd who turned up to offer prayers to the baba, whose real name is Narayan Sakar Vishwa Hari, was three times larger than the 50,000 authorities had granted permission for.
According to the police report, the crush was caused after large numbers surged forward to try and touch the feet of the guru and the ground that he had stood on, while organisers used force to prevent people moving off the roads to safety.
According to witnesses, it had also begun raining, causing people to slip and fall in the crush and high humidity, with mostly women and children among the dead. The death toll rose to 121 on Tuesday.
“Due to the uncontrollable crowd leaving the venue, devotees sitting on the ground were crushed,” said the police report.
“On the other side of the road, the crowd running in the water and mud-filled fields was forcibly stopped by the organising committee with sticks, due to which the pressure of the crowd kept increasing and women, children, and men kept getting crushed.”
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath ordered an investigation into the deaths and prime minister Narendra Modi said that the victims would be “helped in every way”.
Police said cases had been registered against the organisers of the event and that Baba Vishwa Hari is expected to also be arrested later on Wednesday, but police are still trying to ascertain his whereabouts.
Neither the organisers nor the guru have made a statement about the deadly crush.
The guru, who is reported to previously have been a police officer before he became a self-styled spiritual leader, has regularly held such gatherings in local villages for years.
Families of the dead and missing gathered at the hospital and morgue in Hathras, desperate for answers and trying to find the bodies of their loved ones.
Vikas Kumar, whose grandmother was among those killed, told the Indian Express that after the guru had left, people had rushed forward to try to take soil from where he had stood.
After the satsang finished, people started leaving in groups and because it was raining, many slipped and people kept falling on each other and got crushed,” said Kumar.
Numerous incidents of crowd crushes at religious events and pilgrimages have taken place in India in recent years. Rajesh Kumar Jha, a member of parliament, questioned why fatalities kept occurring, stating that “people will keep on dying” if authorities do not take safety protocols seriously enough.