Stampede Adds To Monsoon Tragedy

Crowd Panics At False Rumor; Overall Death Toll Rises To Near 700

(AP)  Rescuers scouring flood-ravaged neighborhoods and outlying villages found dozens of new bodies on Friday, pushing the death toll from record monsoon rains in western India to almost 700.

Some 370 of the dead were from Bombay - the city Indians know by the name Mumbai - and the surrounding area in Maharashtra state.

India's financial hub was pounded by two days of unusually heavy monsoon rains this week, including one day marked the heaviest single day of monsoons in India since record keeping began a century and a half ago.

A stampede set off by rumors of a dam bursting late Thursday also killed at least 15 people and injured more than 25 in an outlying Bombay shantytown, said R.R. Patil, deputy chief minister of the province surrounding Bombay, Maharashtra state.

Residents of the Nehru Nagar slum panicked after hearing the rumors and after landslides in another Bombay shantytown had buried dozens of people alive, mostly young children and old people too slow to escape a collapsing hillside.

Many of the stampede victims were also children. "People died due to false rumors," Patil said. "Fifteen people have been killed and seven are children."

He said police vans with loudspeakers had been deployed to stem the panic in a city already strained by the flooding. The rains shut down much of the city, including the Bombay Stock Exchange.

On Friday, dozens of new bodies were found, pushing the death toll to 696, officials said. Alongside their work in Bombay, rescuers fanned out to vast areas in the western Maharashtra state also hard hit by the monsoons, said N. Nayar, an official at the government's emergency control room.