Hyderabad, January 17: Bhatti Thuapanna of Narayanpet in Mahaboobnagar district thought for a minute that he would die when he found himself being suffocated under the weight of several scrambling people at Pulimedu near Vandiperiyar, Kerala.
But though he saw death at a close range, he was lucky to survive.
Thuapanna was seen on Sunday at the RGIA Cargo waiting anxiously for the mortal remains of his 21-year-old nephew Srinivas, who was not so lucky as him and died in the stampede. Thuapanna had gone to Sabarimala along with eight other devotees, including Srinivas.
On January 14, the group had completed their darshan and were waiting to see the sacred ‘Makara Jyothi’.
Along with thousands of people, Thuapanna and the rest walked up to the Pulmedu gutta, a hill from where devotees watch the Jyothi.
“After seeing the Jyothi, we were climbing down the hill when suddenly several people started falling over each other from behind. There was utter chaos and several panicked people started running in different directions leading to a stampede,” Thuapanna said.
Thuapanna, along with his group, managed to grab on to a parked jeep while several other devotees fell on them and started running over them.
“I was almost underneath the jeep and holding on to a bar but due to several people on top of me, I was unable to breathe,” he said.
Suddenly some of the devotees realised that there was a threat that people trapped under the jeep could die if more people fell on them.
They pushed aside the jeep, giving the trapped people a chance to breathe.
But Thuapanna realised that his college-going nephew Srinivas, a first time visitor to Sabarimala, had become a victim of the stampede.
Devotees said that the stampede began when several vendors at the food courts that were arranged on either side of the narrow road on the hill, pushed the devotees using bamboo sticks afraid that the uncontrollable crowd may enter the food courts.
–Agencies