Baghdad: Some 1,000 Iraqi Shiite pilgrims died on Wednesday in a stampede over a Baghdad bridge, apparently provoked by rumours of a suicide bomber.

The swarming crowds had been heading to a religious ceremony at the Kadhemiyah mosque in the old district of north Baghdad when someone shouted there was a suicide bomber among them, a source said.

Earlier, mortars were fired on the crowd, killing seven people.

“Hundreds of people started running and some threw themselves off the bridge into the river,” the source said. The toll stood at more than 970 after midnight and still rising, Interior Ministry officials said.

Jaseb Latif Ali, a general manager at the Health Ministry, said the toll would top 1,000 at any moment.
Several trampled

Most victims were women and children who “died by drowning or being trampled,” an Interior Ministry official said. Interior Minister Bayan Jabar and two top Shiite officials blamed insurgents for the stampede, but Defence Minister Saadoun Al Dulaimi said the tragedy was not related to sectarian tensions.

More than a million Shiites were marching on an annual procession to the Kadhimiya mosque to mark the death of Imam Mousa Al Kadim, an important Shiite saint.

Health Minister Abdul Mutalib Mohammed said on the state-run Iraqiya television that there were "huge crowds on the bridge and the disaster happened when someone shouted that there is a suicide bomber on the bridge."

"This led to a state of panic among the pilgrims and they started to push each other and there was many cases of suffocation," he said.

People, who were in a heightened state of alert due an earlier mortar attack in the area flew into a state of panic when rumour of the suicide bomber spread through the crowd.

"Hundreds of people started running and some threw themselves off the bridge into the river," a source from Iraq's Interior Minister said.

The pressure of the huge number of people trying to push their way to safety in different directions caused a railing to break, causing many people to plunge 30 metres into the river to their deaths.

People alongside the banks of the Tigris River rescued people and moved bodies but the steep concrete banks of the Tigris made this task nearly impossible.

The head of the country's major Sunni clerical group, the Association of Muslim Sholars expressed his sorrow over the tragic event.

The cleric, Haith Al Dhari, said: "On this occasion we want to express our condolences to all the Iraqis and the parents of the martyrs, who fell today in Kazimiyah and all over Iraq."

He added that the disaster was "another catastrophe and something else that could be added to the list of ongoing Iraqi tragedies."

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani declared three days of national mourning for those who lost their lives in the stampede.