Local media said many people were killed in a stampede and many people died in the early hours of Wednesday as thousands of Hindus participated in a large -scale Maha Kumbh Mahotsav in the city of Prayagraj in North India to take a holy bath in the river.
The distressed family interrogated their missing relatives and stood in line outside a make up, rescue teams were helping the injured and the police tried to manage the crowd.
People’s goods such as clothes, blankets and backpacks were scattered around the stampede scene. It was not immediately clear that nervousness or how many people were hurt. Some local news websites said 10 people were killed.
On Wednesday, there was a holy day during the six -week festival, and the authorities expected a record 100 million devotees to engage in a ritual bath at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and the legendary Saraswati rivers. The main draw of ritual baths is thousands of ash-strips of ascendant Hindu ascetics who arrive in large-scale processions in the direction of the confluence to take a holy dip in the water.
The incident did not bother millions of Hindu pilgrims who continued the site, even police officers urged them to keep them away from the confluence on the megone.
The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh State Yogi Adityanath, that is, urged the people not to go towards the Sangam and instead take a bath on the banks of the other river. Adityanath did not give any reference to the stampede in a post on the social platform X, but warned people not to pay attention to any rumors. “
The Maha Kumbh Mahotsav, held every 12 years, began on 13 January and is the largest religious gathering in the world. Officials hope that more than 400 million people will climb the pilgrimage site in total.
Hindus believe that a dip at the confluence of the three rivers – two worldly and one mythological – will purify them with their previous sins and end their process of rebirth.
Indian authorities have described the festival as the world’s largest religious gathering. Around 150 million people have already attended the festival, including the choice of celebrities like Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and Home Minister Amit Shah and Chris Martin of Coldplay.
Authorities built a huge tent city on Riverbank to accommodate visitors. It has 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 toilets, plus roads, electricity and water, communication towers and 11 hospitals.
Around 50,000 security personnel are deployed in the city to maintain law and order and manage the crowd. So the authorities installed more than 2,500 cameras, some operated by AI, to send information on congestion movement and density to four central control rooms, where officers can quickly deploy personnel to avoid Stamped.
In 2013, at least 40 pilgrims who were attending the same festival, were killed in a stampede at a train station in Prayagraj.
The Indian religious festivals are relatively common, where large crowds gather in small areas with poor infrastructure and some security measures. At least 116 people died in July, most of them women and children, when thousands of people stamped a tent in Hathras city at a religious meeting in northern India.