Iraq mourns as stampede loss overshadows war

BAGHDAD - Grieving relatives of about 1000 Iraqis killed in a stampede combed hospitals and morgues yesterday for missing loved ones as the nation grieved over a tragedy which has overshadowed the daily bloodshed of war.

The stampede on a bridge over the river Tigris in Baghdad saw the greatest loss of Iraqi life in a single incident since the 2003 war to oust Saddam Hussein.

At Baghdad Medical City, a hospital in the capital, frantic relatives searched bodies swathed in brightly coloured red and yellow blankets looking for loved ones, many holding their noses against the stench as the fierce summer hastened decomposition.

Funeral tents were erected in the impoverished Baghdad Shi'ite suburb of Sadr City. Many of the bodies then made their final journey to Najaf, the most holy Shi'ite city, for burial.

The road to Najaf was choked with coffins loaded onto minivans and coaches. Security was stepped up, with dozens of police and army checkpoints on the road.

Three days of official mourning will quieten a country inured to mass killing on its streets but shocked by the disaster.

At least 965 people are known to have died on Wednesday when thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims taking part in a religious festival rushed for imagined safety onto the bridge, only to die in the river below or be crushed on the roadway.

The final toll, one senior official said, was likely to be more than 1,000, once all the bodies scattered in hospitals, makeshift morgues and family homes across the city were counted.

PAYMENT FOR THE VICTIMS

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari on Thursday ordered the payment of 3 million dinars (around US$2000) to the family of each victim of the disaster.

Though fears of sectarian attacks, real or imagined, may have contributed to the panic that drove the pilgrims to their deaths, the shock was felt across the factional divides.

A barrage of mortar and rocket attacks on the crowd, some 200,000 strong or more, had added to the tension early in the day. It killed seven people and was claimed by a Sunni group avowing links to the insurgency against the U.S.-backed, Shi'ite-led government.

Then, whether by malicious design or simple panic, a warning from within the crowd of a suicide bomber among them sparked a rush for safety that proved illusory. Blood dripped from concrete walls around the bridge. Bodies drifted in the river.

Jaafari, apparently accepting that the stampede was inspired by Sunni radicals bent on exploiting sectarian divides, vowed tough action against them.

"The coming period will witness a strategic development in confronting terror and terrorists. And we will hit hard those murderers, radical militants and Saddamists," he said in a statement on Thursday.

Most of the victims were women and children who died by drowning or being trampled, an Interior Ministry official said.

It was by far the biggest loss of life in such a crowd since more than 1,400 pilgrims died at Mecca during the haj in 1990.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabor and other Shi'ite officials blamed Sunni insurgents for the stampede, but Defence Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab himself, said it was not related to sectarian tensions gripping Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Whatever sparked the rush for safety, the fear that a bomber might be on the loose was well grounded after previous attacks on Shi'ite religious events in the past two years.

Tensions are high among Iraq's rival religious and ethnic communities ahead of a referendum on a new constitution for the post-Saddam Hussein era.

But despite the pall of death hanging over the country, government spokesman Laith Kubba said Iraq executed three convicted murderers on Thursday, the first executions since the fall of Saddam.

- REUTERS