Nepal, September 30: At least 23 people are dead and dozens injured after a church building collapsed during a Christian convention in eastern Nepal.
Around 1500 Christians had gathered in the town of Dharan for the meeting when a makeshift three-storey structure built to accommodate participants fell apart at about midnight after hours of heavy rainfall, police officers said.
“The participants were preparing to sleep when the wall collapsed. Most of the victims were on the ground floor of the building,” police inspector Mohan Bikram Dahal told AFP.
“The wall was made of bamboo and it could not withstand the weight of the people in the church building.”
Police said more than 60 people were also injured in the incident.
Many of the dead were women and children and at least one of the victims was from neighbouring India, they said.
The El-Shaddai Church, an international Christian organisation with a base in the northern Indian town of Darjeeling, was holding its annual convention in Dharan, around 320 kilometres east of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.
Police said many Indian Christians had travelled to the Zion Prayer House, a church in Dharan, for the meeting, and the bamboo structure that collapsed had been built to house overspill.
Rescue teams were at the scene and the injured had been taken to hospitals in Dharan, they said, adding that the army had been drafted in to assist with the rescue effort.
Accidents are common in poverty-stricken Nepal, where safety standards are lax and frequently ignored.
The incident happened as majority-Hindu Nepal celebrates its biggest annual festival, Dashain, and came months after a bomb blast in a church in Kathmandu killed two people and injured 14 others.
There are around 500,000 Christians and nearly 3000 churches in Nepal, according to a survey conducted in 2007. Nepal has a population of 27 million.
The first church was established by missionaries from Darjeeling in 1952 and the number of Christians grew rapidly after that date as the country opened up to foreign influences.
However, Christians were subject to persecution and sometimes imprisoned during the Panchayat era, which began in 1960 when the then king Mahendra seized power and imposed direct rule that lasted for 30 years.
Last year, Nepal’s former Maoist-led government abolished the world’s last Hindu monarchy and declared the country a secular state.
—Agencies