Stampede kills 18 in monsoon-hit Bombay

BOMBAY - At least 18 people, including seven children, were killed in the rain-ravaged Indian city of Bombay when rumours that a lake had burst its banks triggered a slum stampede, police said yesterday.

The stampede pushed the death toll from two days of monsoon flooding and landslides in India's financial hub and the surrounding western state to nearly 700 people.

People in a crowded slum in the north of the city of 15 million rushed out of their homes in pitch darkness late on Thursday, hearing rumours of floods that turned out to be unfounded.

"People were already on the edge after heavy rains in the last few days and rumours had been swirling around," a police official said. "There were rumours of a lake bursting its banks ... and a tsunami that led to the stampede."

Seven people were injured in the stampede and police used loudspeakers to dispel rumours and calm the panicky residents.

"We didn't quite understand what was going on but everyone was rushing out of their houses and we also followed them," one young mother told Indian television.

"It was totally dark outside and in all the commotion a lot of people, especially women and children, got pushed down and trampled."

Another woman said she fell as the crowd tried to rush out of the narrow lanes of the low-lying slum to higher ground.

"Everyone was shouting and screaming that the sea-water is coming or that a dam had burst."

In other parts of the city, roads were clearing after the worst of the floodwaters subsided and authorities appealed to people to retrieve the cars they had abandoned when flooding brought the city to a standstill on Tuesday.

Trains were running, albeit with delays, and Bombay's airport had started operating normally after being closed for two days.

Workers who had finally made it home on Thursday, after one or two nights in hotels, on office floors or on the street, began returning to work, and trading on financial markets resumed.

Relief coordinators put the city's death toll at about 370, over half the total for the whole of the state of Maharashtra.

Rescuers were still trying to recover the bodies of an estimated 100 people buried under an avalanche of mud in the village of Juigaon, 150 km south of Bombay.

A landslide at a slum near the Bombay suburb of Andheri killed at least 56 people, and efforts continued to retrieve dozens more bodies believed to be buried in the mud.

Newspapers reported that about 16 people, including three teenage college students, had died in their cars, trapped by rising water levels which jammed the doors.

The chaos was a brutal reminder of Bombay's rickety infrastructure, despite a hugely ambitious US$6 billion plan to turn it into the next Shanghai.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, visiting Bombay to announce a five billion rupee ($170.2million) aid package for relief work, said the city's infrastructure needed modernising to be fit enough for India's commercial capital.

- REUTERS