Pilgrims buried as death toll grows

Mass funerals for victims of Baghdad’s stampede were held across Iraq on Thursday, with politicians trading blame for the deadliest disaster since the 2003 invasion.

Fleets of mini-buses and pick-up trucks ferried hundreds of corpses for burial to the Shia holy city of Najaf while emergency services continued scouring the Tigris river for bodies . The death toll from Wednesday’s tragedy could yet rise to over 1 000.

The interior ministry said 953 died and 815 were injured when Shia pilgrims stampeded at a religious commemoration. The health ministry said 843 died and 439 were injured. With casualties scattered across so many hospitals, morgues and mosques it was not immediately possible to reconcile the discrepancy.

Tents sprang up across Sadr City, a Shia slum in east Baghdad which was home to many of the victims, to host funerals. Men beat their chests, women and girls wailed. Many of the dead were taken to Najaf’s vast Shia cemetery, Wadi al-Salaam, or the Valley of Peace.

Three days of mourning were declared and television programmes such as Iraqi Star, a local version of Pop Idol, suspended filming.

There was still disbelief that the annual trek to the northern Baghdad shrine of an 8th century imam, Moussa al-Kadhim, turned into such carnage. A vast throng stampeded reportedly because of a rumour of a suicide bomber. Hundreds suffocated on the al-Aima bridge, others fell or jumped into the Tigris and drowned.

Two hours before the stampede mortars landed near the shrine, killing at least six and wounding dozens. An obscure Sunni Arab insurgent group, the Army of the Victorious Sect, claimed responsibility for the attack which unnerved the crowd but did not directly cause the mass panic.

A political battle flared over whether to blame the stampede on sectarian Sunni insurgents — who have massacred hundreds of Shias at other religious events — or on incompetent crowd control by the authorities. President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, acknowledged a degree of government culpability by calling for an investigation to determine ”how failures doubled the casualties”.

But the interior minister and others from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading party in the ruling Shia-led coalition, said the panic was the result of an insurgent plot in which an infiltrator made the fateful shout about a suicide bomber.

The health minister, Abdul Mutalib Mohammad Ali, who is linked to a rival Shia group led by the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, blamed poor policing and called on the interior and defence ministers to resign.

The conflicting interpretations reflected a power struggle between government factions which has sharpened in the run-up to a referendum next month on a draft Constitution and an election due in December. Some of the rhetoric fuelled conspiracy theories about how Sunni insurgents orchestrated the stampede as well as the alleged poisoning of dozens of pilgrims with doctored fruit and drinks.

The most revered Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged unity. The Shia Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari noted that Sunni residents near the Shia shrine rushed to help the pilgrims, wading into the river to save the living and retrieve the dead, others donating food and blood.