Close to nine persons including six males and three females lost their lives in a stampede at the Asawase Community in the Kumasi netropolis of Ghana following a jam to commemorate the Eid-al-Fitr festivities. The disaster, according to media reports, has resulted in seven injured persons receiving treatment with one in critical condition at Manhyia Hospital. The cause of the stampede remains unknown, but media reports show that most attendees started storming out of the premises following a fight which broke during the jam.
Narrating the incident to journalists, Member of Parliament (MP) for the Asawase constituency Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka has stated that such jams had been frowned upon by community stakeholders mainly because of the bouts of fights that often emanate there. Muntaka further revealed that efforts to stop the jam proved futile as party lovers relocated the jam to an unknown location after police dispersed the group.
“Normally we always have a big carnival anytime there is Eid in Kumasi. But we realized that in recent times the youth will normally put themselves into fun clubs having their canopies group by group. So we realized that the thing was getting out of hand because sometimes, they will wait until around midnight and there will be a fight between one group or the other and then you will hear all sorts of things happening.
We were not going to allow the carnival to last more than 8:30pm not knowing that a group had relocated from the carnival environs where we all know that this thing normally happens into the Asawase community center which is far away from the carnival ground.
We didn’t expect that people will go to these areas. Everything was going on well until around 3am when two groups had a fight and then they brought the fight into the community center and in a bid for people to rush out of the community center, there was this stampede,” he explained.
One survivor, Charles Amoa-Boateng revealed that following a sudden power cut inside the club, many party attendants began panicking and rushing out of the scene, stating that people wailed and cried in a fight to get out. “I was bitten by several people in my fight to get out. Some people were stepping on me while others were throwing their hands for help to get out,” he narrated.
Police officials are investigating the actual cause of the stampede. All of the deceased were laid to rest yesterday in a public funeral.
