Man desperately seeks missing sister among bodies after stampede

Agra: “I turned over more than 100 dead bodies to check their faces,” a brother, whose 50-year-old sister has been missing since the stampede incident in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras, said here on Wednesday.

After visiting the postmortem houses in Hathras, Etah and Aligarh, “where a large number of dead bodies were lying and the situation was horrifying”, Rakesh Kumar (46) said he reached the postmortem house here on his motorcycle in the morning to search for his sister, Harbeji Devi.

The death toll in the stampede that broke out in a ‘satsang’ in Hathras rose to 121 on Wednesday and police filed an FIR against the organisers, accusing them of hiding evidence and flouting conditions with 2.5 lakh people crammed into a venue in which only 80,000 were permitted.

The victims were part of the crowd which had gathered near Phulrai village in the Sikandrarau area of Hathras for the ‘satsang’ by religious preacher Baba Narayan Hari, also known as Saakar Vishwa Hari Bhole Baba.

The incident took place as the ‘satsang’ ended. Some accounts said people slipped in the slush as they ran after the preacher’s car, triggering the stampede.

“On Tuesday, I got a call from my brother-in-law, who lives in a village in Aligarh, informing me that Harbeji had gone to the ‘satsang’ but has not returned, while their neighbours (who also went to attend the programme) have reached home,” Kumar, a resident of Uttar Pradesh’s Kasganj, said.“I was informed that some bodies had been sent to Hathras and Aligarh. I then went there looking for my sister.”