ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — A crowd stampeded early Tuesday after leaving a New Year’s fireworks show in Ivory Coast’s main city, killing 61 people - many of them children and teenagers - and injuring more than 200, rescue workers said.
Thousands had gathered at the Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan’s Plateau district to see the fireworks. It was only the second New Year’s Eve fireworks display since peace returned to this West African nation after a bloody upheaval over presidential elections put the nation on the brink of civil war and turned Abidjan into a battle zone.
With 2013 showing greater promise, people were in the mood to celebrate on New Year’s Eve. Families took children and they watched the rockets burst in the nighttime sky. But only an hour into the new year, as the crowds poured onto the Boulevard de la Republic after the show, something caused a stampede, said Col. Issa Sako of the Fire Department rescue team. How so many deaths occurred on the broad boulevard and how the tragedy started is likely to be the subject of an investigation.
Careless police action could have incited the stampede, witnesses said. At the hospital in the city’s adjoining Cocody neighborhood, one of the wounded - a young man who declined to give his name - said the police had tried to disperse the crowd as it was leaving the stadium. That action provoked a mass panic, the young man said, and the crowdsurged forward.
Many of the younger ones in the crowd went down, trampled underfoot. Most of those killed were between 8 and 15 years old
“The flood of people leaving the stadium became a stampede which led to the deaths of more than 60 and injured more than 200,” Sako told Ivory Coast state TV.
Desperate parents went to the city morgue, the hospital and to the stadium to try to find missing children. Mamadou Sanogo was searching for his 9-year-old son, Sayed.
“I have just seen all the bodies, but I cannot find my son,” said a tearful Sanogo. “I don’t know what to do.”
State TV showed a woman sobbing in the back of an ambulance; another was bent overon the side of the street, apparently in pain; and another, barely conscious and wearing only a bra on her upper body, was hoisted by rescuers. There were also scenes of small children being treated in a hospital. One boy grimaced in pain and a girl with colored braids in her hair lay under a blanket with one hand bandaged.
“The precise circumstances of this tragic occurrence are being looked into by the security services,” Ivory Coast’s interior minister, Hamed Bakayoko, said Tuesday on television station RTI. RTI showed rescue workers carrying bodies through the streets and ambulances lined up in the darkness.
Bakayoko told RTI that “the New Year’s Eve celebrations brought many onto the streets of Plateau. There were 50,000 people on the streets. They were going home, and there was a stampede.”
At the scene, witnesses said there were piles of abandonedshoes.
The death toll could rise, officials said.
After the sun rose, soldiers were patrolling the site that was littered with victims’ clothes, shoes, torn sandals andother belongings. President Alassane Ouattara and his wife, Dominique, visited some of the injured in the hospital. The first lady leaned over one child who was on a bed in a crowded hospital ward and tried to console the youngster. The president pledged that the government would pay for their treatment, his office said.
The government organized the fireworks to celebrate Ivory Coast’s peace, after several months of political violence in early 2011 after disputed elections.
This is not Ivory Coast’s first stadium tragedy. In 2009, 22 people died and more than 130 were injured in a stampede at a World Cup qualifying match at the Houphouet Boigny Stadium, prompting FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, to impose a fine of tens of thousands of dollars on Ivory Coast’s soccer federation.The stadium, which officially holds 35,000, was overcrowded at the time of the disaster.
A year later, two people were killed and 30 wounded in a stampede at a municipal stadium during a reggae concert in Bouake, the country’s secondlargest city. The concert was organized in the city, held by rebels at the time, to promote peace and reconciliation.
Ivory Coast is the world’s largest cocoa producer, growing more than 37 percent of the world’s annual crop of cocoa beans, which are used to make chocolate.
Information for this article was contributed by Inza Bakayoko of The Associated Press and by Adam Nossiter and Loucoumane Coulibaly of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 01/02/2013