36 people killed, 47 injured in Shanghai stampede

At least 36 people were killed and 47 injured in a stampede during New Year's Eve celebrations in Shanghai, the city's government reported.

The deaths occurred in the eastern city's famous Bund, the riverside area where tens of thousands had gathered.

The stampede began after 11:35 pm in Chen Yi Square, the city said. The exact cause was unclear. President Xi Jinping ordered an immediate investigation, the official Xinhua news service reported. In interviews Thursday at a local hospital, people who had been at the scene said that most of the victims were young people, including a 16-year-old girl.

Images posted online showed huge crowds filling the pedestrian areas along the Huangpu River for a midnight light show. Wu Tao, a man from Anhui Province, told the Shanghai-based news website Eastday.com that shortly before the stampede began, the crowd in the square had grown disorderly. About 11:50 pm, people in a nearby building began dropping green pieces of paper that looked like American $100 bills, which set off a rush, Eastday.com quoted Wu as saying. Some witnesses said they saw the fake cash fliers but did not think they played a role in setting off the stampede.

Xiao Ji, who said he had been in the square, wrote on his Weibo account: "All of a sudden, the whole crowd stopped moving - lots of crying and shouting. The police were helping, but there were so many people. I saw people faint. I was so scared." Guo Xianzhong, a journalist with the Southern Metropolis Daily who was at the scene, wrote that the crush of people occurred on a stairway to a viewing platform near the prewar Peace Hotel.

"People who wanted to come up and those who wanted to go down became congested, with more and more people filling in, and it became tense," he wrote on the newspaper's website.

Around 11:30 p.m., there were sounds of women screaming and children crying. A few minutes later, someone fell on the staircase, and people began to shout: "Don't push! Someone fell!" Mr. Guo wrote.

Photos from the scene showed dense crushes of people pushing to escape the crowd.

The injured were treated at four local hospitals. On Thursday morning, the hospitals' lobbies were filled with friends and relatives of victims waiting for word on their condition. Early in the afternoon, a woman wailed and fell to the ground at the Long March Hospital after learning that her 16-year-old daughter had died, while others sobbed in doorways.

The Shanghai Daily reported that in previous years the New Year's Eve show was held in a more open area along the Bund. But because of safety concerns, the celebration was moved to a more confined area known as Bund Origin.

©2015 The New York Times News Service