950 Die in Stampede on Baghdad Bridge

ROBERT F. WORTH - New York Times: "More than 950 people were killed and hundreds more injured Wednesday morning when rumors of a suicide bomber provoked a frenzied stampede in a procession of Shiite pilgrims as they crossed a bridge in northern Baghdad, government and hospital officials said.

Most of the dead were crushed or suffocated, witnesses said, but many drowned after falling or jumping into the Tigris River after the panicking crowd broke through the bridge's railings. The disaster was by far the greatest one-day loss of life since the American-led invasion in March 2003.

Fear had begun spreading in the crowd an hour earlier, after a group of insurgents fired rockets and mortars near the gold-domed Shiite shrine where the pilgrims were headed, killing at least seven people and wounding two dozen.

Insurgents have often struck at Shiite religious processions in the past. But the stampede appears to have started with unfounded rumors of a man wearing a suicide belt on the bridge.

The pilgrims were among a throng of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor Shiites from northern Baghdad and the surrounding area who had converged on the shrine bearing colored banners and symbolic coffins to mark the anniversary of the death of Imam Musa Kadhim, one of Shiite Islam's holiest figures.

"We were all chanting slogans about Imam Musa, and then people started shouting about a suicide bomber," Waleed Hameed Andul al-Radha said as he lay on a cot in Kindi Hospital with a chest injury, after removing an oxygen mask to speak. "They started crashing into each other; no one would look back or give a hand to help the ones who had fallen. People started running on top of each other, and everyone was trying to save himself."

In the aftermath of the stampede, with some pilgrims continuing their procession, black-clad women keened over dead bodies in the streets of Kadhimiya, the Shiite neighborhood where Imam Kadhim's shrine is situated. On the bridge itself, hundreds of the victims' sandals and shoes had been swept into piles.

Local hospitals were overwhelmed, their floors lined with dead bodies, including many women and children, some drenched in river water. Relatives of the victims streamed in and out, some of them pulling up the sheets on dozens of bodies until they recognized one, and then bursting into wails of grief.

There were reports in the capital's hospitals that some pilgrims had died in a mass poisoning. But Health Ministry officials said they could not confirm any poisonings. Shiite Muslims believe that Imam Kadhim was poisoned by agents of Harun al-Rashid, the Sunni caliph, in the late eighth century, and history often merges with the present among religious pilgrims here.

The Iraqi authorities had blocked off roads to car traffic throughout northern Baghdad starting Tuesday evening, anticipating attacks on the hundreds of thousands of Shiites who were converging on the capital. The bridge where the stampede took place marks an especially fragile fault line, linking Kadhimiya with Adhamiya, a Sunni area that has long been a stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein and the insurgency.

The disaster came at a time of high sectarian tensions, three days after the new draft constitution was presented to Iraq's Parliament over the angry objections of Sunni representatives. Many leading Sunnis have called for voters to reject the document when it goes before a nationwide referendum in October, and there have been demonstrations against the charter by Sunnis in central and northern Iraq.

Also on Wednesday, an official with the Iraqi Special Tribunal announced that Oct. 19 would be the starting date for the trial of Mr. Hussein and three of his top officials. That trial, to be presided over by five judges, could also prove as divisive as the constitutional referendum, especially after several recent demonstrations by Sunni Arabs chanting their loyalty to the former president.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, appeared on television to declare a three-day national mourning period for the stampede victims.

Iraq's most revered Shiite religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a statement calling for an investigation and putting the blame for the stampede on "terrorists." Other Shiite figures placed the blame more squarely on insurgents, as did Iraq's Shiite interior minister, Bayan Jabr. But it was too early to say how the Shiites, who have shown remarkable restraint in the face of attacks by Sunni insurgents in the past, would respond to the stampede.

For their part, leaders of Iraq's Sunnis and Kurds released statements on Wednesday calling for calm and sending condolences to the victims and their families. The leader of the Iraq Islamic Party, the country's best-known Sunni political group, singled out the Sunni residents of Adhamiya, calling on them to help out in the disaster.

For some Iraqi leaders, the disaster said more about bad planning than sectarian agendas. Iraq's Shiite health minister, Abdul Muqtalib Ari Muhammad, issued an angry call for the ministers of interior and defense - a Shiite and a Sunni, respectively - to take full responsibility for the disaster or resign. Speaking at a news conference, he said the ministers should have better secured the roads leading to the shrine.

The ministers of defense and interior defended the government's preparations in a separate news conference, saying they had flooded the city with soldiers and successfully protected the pilgrims against car bombs.

The Sunni defense minister, Sadoun Dulaimi, added that millions of Shiite pilgrims had traveled to the capital without incident through the violent area south of Baghdad in recent days. Many Shiites have been killed in the last year by Sunni extremists in that area.

Survivors of the stampede said the pilgrimage began peacefully Wednesday morning, with vast crowds of Shiites beating drums, flagellating themselves and singing religious songs as they proceeded through northern Baghdad neighborhoods. Bystanders offered them cold water and food as they passed.

Then about 8 a.m., came the sound of two loud explosions, said Ali Abdul Zahra al-Saiedy, 51, a government clerk who lives in Sadr City, like many of the other pilgrims.

"I was near the Aimma Bridge on the Adhamiya side when we heard the explosions, and everything was chaos, with people running everywhere," Mr. Saiedy said.

Across the river, insurgents had fired mortars and rockets near the compound that contains Imam Kadhim's shrine. American combat helicopter pilots fired on the insurgents, United States military officials said. Ground troops rushed to the area, and detained more than a dozen suspects after finding rocket-launching tubes, the officials said.

Soon afterward, frightened pilgrims began surging across the Aimma Bridge, where they ran into the vast crowds coming the other way, toward the shrine, Mr. Saiedy said.

It was then, as the pilgrims were crowding the bridge from both sides, that people began shouting about a suicide bomber, the witnesses said. Within minutes, a full-blown stampede erupted.

"So many people were running in every direction, screaming, and many were falling and being trampled," Mr. Saiedy said. "Most of the fallen people were children and women. Some were suffocated, and crushed by the crowds of people, all of them terrified."

Before long, terrified pilgrims broke through the bridge's railings, and many fell or were pushed over the side.

Iraqi Army soldiers fired their weapons into the air as the stampede began, in an effort to control the panic that some witnesses said had only made it worse.

The bridge, which is the only way to get from eastern Baghdad to the shrine without a long detour, was a natural bottleneck. The problem was worsened, witnesses said, by concrete barriers on the bridge - put in place for protection from car bombs - which narrowed the corridor.

The stampede came as dozens of families began fleeing from towns in northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border, where American fighter-bombers staged airstrikes on Tuesday for the second time in a week against the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Some families held up white flags to signal that they were not engaged in the fighting.

The area, a transit point for weapons and insurgent fighters coming across the border from Syria, has seen fierce battles both between American forces and insurgents, and between rival tribes.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Thaier Aldaami, Khaled al-Ansary, Layla Isitfan, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedy, Harb al-Mukhtar and Qais Mizher."