Pakistan food stampede kills 18 women and children

At least 18 women and children have been killed in a stampede as they struggled to get the free food a charity was handing out, said police. Dozens more people have been hurt in the disaster, which happened in the country’s largest city and financial capital, Karachi.

The free flour was being handed out in a poor, crowded district of the city by a private group as part of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. During the holy month of Ramadan, which ends next week, many Muslims give out free food to the poor. Food prices generally rise during Ramadan and hand-outs from the wealthy are a major source of relief for the poor.

Hundreds of women had crowded together outside a building in a busy and disadvantaged district and were pushing up some stairs when the accident happened. People started falling over each other when the lights on the stairs went off because of a power cut, said an eyewitness. "As we were climbing up the stairs, the power went off. I also fainted," Seema Bibi, 13, told Reuters news service as she searched the panicked crowd for missing members of her family.

Meanwhile, TV footage showed distraught relatives arriving at a hospital where the injured had been taken. "The deaths were caused by suffocation and the stampede in one of the most congested localities of Khori Garden," Karachi police chief Waseem Ahmad, told Agence France Presse news agency. Police were holding the man who had been handing out the food, he added, because he had not warned the police beforehand. President Asif Ali Zardari expressed his shock at the loss of life and has ordered an immediate inquiry, the Pakistani APP news agency reported.

About a third of Pakistan's 170 million people live in poverty and over the last year, rising prices, unemployment, frequent power cuts and shortages of basic food supplies such as flour have compounded the misery for many. Last year, after nine years of being ruled by the army, a civilian government started to run the country. The new government has vowed to help the poor, but it faces tight budgets despite pledges of billions of dollars of aid from allies. The government is also struggling to tackle militant violence, which put many countries off investing in Pakistan, which worsened the economic crisis that forced Pakistan to agree to a $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund bail-out in November.