By ROBERT MACKEY
More than 300 people were killed and hundreds more injured in a stampede at a festival in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, on Monday.
Many of the victims were crushed and some fell from a bridge into a river and drowned, after panic tore through the crowd when “several people were electrocuted while celebrating the end of an annual water festival,” Reuters reports.
Speaking to CNN, Steve Finch of the English-language Phnom Penh Post said that there were reports that some of the dead were electrocuted after Cambodian police had fired water cannons at the crowd.
In the latest of three live updates on the catastrophe broadcast on Cambodian television, the country’s prime minister, Hun Sen, said that 339 people had been killed and 329 injured in what he called the “biggest tragedy” to hit Cambodia since the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s, according to The Associated Press.
Graphic raw video posted online by The A.P. shows anguished scenes at a hospital in Phnom Penh, where the injured were rushed for treatment on Monday night, and the bodies of some victims the rescuers were unable to save:
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