Eighteen people were killed and 49 others injured in a stampede as a large number of Dawoodi Bohra community members had gathered to pay their last respects to their spiritual leader Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin at the ‘Saifee Mahal’ in Malabar Hill in the early hours of Saturday.
The stampede broke out around 1.30 am when the gate of Syedna’s residence ‘Saifee Mahal’ was closed abruptly following the huge rush. Seeing the entrance being closed, the anxious mourners tried to surge inside the ‘Saifee Mahal’, where the body of their community leader who passed away on Friday, had been kept for darshan, leading to a major stampede. Those killed included two teenagers and two septuagenarians.
Talking to mediapersons, Mumbai Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh said that most of them died due to suffocation. “The lanes and roads there are very narrow. lack of space for movement led to suffocation….Some people fell unconscious. After the gates of Saifee Mahal were closed, the people began to trip over one another. As the doctors are claiming, cause of the death was suffocation,” Singh said, adding that the exact cause of stampede could be established only after a probe. Both the police and the Dawoodi community functionaries said that they did not expect such a huge crowd.
“The security arrangements were made for about 6,000 people. Our arrangements went haywire after thousands of people began to pour in at the Saifee Mahal after 9 pm...The stampede was caused by the closure of the gates of the Saifee Mahal,” a senior police officer present at the scene said. Meanwhile, Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil has ordered a probe into the circumstances leading to the stampede.
However, the early morning tragedy did not deter Dawoodi Bohra community as tens of thousands of community members joined Syedna’s funeral procession from the Saifee Mahal to Raudat Tahera mausoleum at Bhendi Bazar. The funeral procession, which began at 10 am and made its way through the Walkeshwar Road, took five hours to reach the Raudat Tahera mausoleum, where the mortal remains of the spiritual leader were laid to rest around 4 pm.