A New Year's stampede on Shanghai's historic waterfront killed at least 36 revellers and injured dozens more, mostly women, as police admitted fewer officers than previously were securing the area.
While some witnesses said revellers had scrambled for fake money thrown from a building, others downplayed its likelihood as the cause and said huge crowds were to blame.The disaster, centred on a wide stairway leading up to a riverfront promenade, happened shortly before midnight late on Wednesday as people packed the Bund area to usher in 2015, according to a city government statement.
In an unusually critical commentary, the official news agency Xinhua said it was a "wake-up call that the world's second-largest economy is still a developing country which has fragile social management".
"People were screaming, women were screaming and people starting jumping off the staircase to get clear," said a Shanghai resident who gave her name as Sarah.
"There was a quiet, and then people on the stairs fell in a wave and people started to get trampled," Sarah, a Singaporean national who watched from a rooftop terrace across the road, told AFP.
People carried the dead and injured through a gap in the crowd as flashes from emergency vehicles and revellers' light sticks lit up the night, mobile phone video footage viewed by AFP showed.
American Andrew Shainker, an English teacher, posted on Chinese messaging network WeChat: "I witnessed lifeless bodies being carried out of a crowd one by one and dumped on the street.
- 'Screams of panic' -
"You could hear screams of panic. What I thought was the best view on the Bund ended up being a front row seat to an international tragedy."
Most of the victims appeared to be Chinese, he said.
"I felt I was suffocating," wrote one poster on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. "Some people with us will not come back."
City officials said 36 people had been confirmed killed and 47 injured, 13 of them seriously.
Xinhua said that among the dead was a Taiwanese national and 25 women. It added that the ages of the first 10 identified fatalities ranged from 16 to 36.
Chinese President Xi Jinping demanded an immediate investigation into the cause, the agency reported.
The Bund, renowned for its colonial architecture, is the former financial district of China's commercial hub and now a popular tourist destination, packed with high-end restaurants and expensive boutiques.
Shanghai residents have traditionally flocked there to celebrate New Year, and more recently the district government overseeing the area has put on official celebrations.
This year's "countdown" included a light show, singing performances and finally fireworks.
- Dollar-like notes -
It was scaled down and moved to a new location away from the main Bund specifically due to concerns about overcrowding after nearly 300,000 people turned out to see the spectacle in 2014, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said.
Senior officer Cai Lixin acknowledged that the numbers of police at the scene were fewer than for previous events, telling government-linked news portal Eastday.com: "Yesterday, there wasn't an event, therefore we didn't arrange for as many officers compared to something like last year's National Day celebration."
Both Sarah and Shainker were in Bund 18, a shopping and entertainment complex where witnesses said dollar-like notes had been thrown from a window, prompting a scramble to retrieve them.
But others pointed out a wide street separates the building from the staircase where the main stampede occurred.
Pictures posted online showed the slips of paper were a similar size, shape and colour as US currency, but emblazoned with the logo of M18, a nightclub in the building, and stamped "New Year 2015".
By dawn there was little evidence of the disaster, which is typical in China for major incident scenes, which authorities are quick to clear.
The plaza where the accident took place is named for Shanghai's first Communist mayor Chen Yi, and mourners laid flowers at his statue. One young man placed his hands together in prayer in front of the makeshift memorial.
More than 20 police vehicles were parked outside Shanghai Number One People's Hospital, where most of the injured were taken, while police barred most visitors except two members from each family.
The mother of an injured 12-year-old boy sat in a chair, crying, surrounded by relatives.
"We don't know what is happening but we can't get in to see him," the woman's older brother, who declined to be named, said.
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In 1993, 20 people were killed as New Year's revellers poured into a narrow street in Hong Kong, at the time still under British rule.
Source : AFP
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