August 07, 2008	Thursday	Sha’aban 4, 1429

NEW DELHI: An Indian pilgrim knocked unconscious in a stampede that killed 150 people woke up in a morgue as doctors prepared to perform a postmortem examination on him, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Mange Ram, 19, lost consciousness in the stampede triggered by rumours of a landslide that caused panic among thousands of people climbing a steep mountain path, the report said.

Ram told the Times of India he awoke in a hospital morgue after Sunday’s tragedy at the Naina Devi shrine in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.

“When I woke up, I was in the middle of a row of bodies waiting for postmortem,” he said.

“My throat was parched and I asked for water. Towering over me the doctors and nursing staff at Anandpur Sahib Civil Hospital looked dazed.

“They must have been surprised to see a dead man come alive like that,” he said.

Sat Pal Aggarwal, a doctor on the pilgrimage, said few checks were carried out to see if victims were alive and might have been saved.

“People were dumped quite haphazardly into trucks without following any procedure or checking if they were alive,” the paper quoted him as saying.

Despite the huge loss of life, the pilgrimage continued only hours after the corpses had been cleared.

The temple, devoted to the goddess Naina Devi, sits on a hilltop in the Himalayas and devotees must climb a narrow stairway to reach it. It has been the site of previous deadly accidents.

Crowd control is poor in India and stampedes are common.

Three years ago, 257 Hindu devotees, mainly women and children, were crushed to death in a stampede at a religious pilgrimage in western India.—AFP