Phnom Penh, November 23
Rescuers today trawled a muddy river for more bodies and Cambodia prepared for a day of mourning in wake of a stampede by thousands of festival goers, which left at least 378 dead and hundreds of injured.

The prime minister called it the country’s biggest tragedy since the murderous 1970s reign of the Khmer Rouge.

A panic-stricken crowd celebrating the end of the rainy season on an island in a river tried to flee over a narrow bridge in the capital Phnom Penh yesterday and many people were crushed underfoot or fell over its sides into the water. Disoriented victims struggled to find an escape hatch through the human mass, pushing their way in every direction. After the stampede, bodies were stacked upon bodies on the bridge as rescuers swarmed the area.

The search for bodies in and along the Bassac River continued today as state television showed horrific footage of twisted and writhing bodies, both alive and dead, piled on each other. Some desperately reached out with their hands, screaming for help and grasping for hands of rescuers who struggled to pull limp bodies from the pile as if they were trapped in sand or snow.

It remained unclear what sparked the stampede. Police and witnesses pointed to the narrow bridge as providing inadequate access to and from the island. Two Singaporean businessmen who organised a sound-and-light show for the festival, said authorities had closed another bridge earlier in the day, forcing tens of thousands of people to use a single span.

One witness said the trouble started when several people fell unconscious in the press of the crowd. Another survivor said he heard a police siren just before the panic erupted. Ambulances raced back and forth between the river and the hospitals for several hours after the stampede.

“This is the biggest tragedy we have experienced in the last 31 years, since the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime,” Prime Minister Hun Sen said, referring to the ultra-communist movement whose radical policies are blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people during the 1970s. — AP