Kunda, India - Hundreds of grieving relatives buried and cremated their wives, mothers and children Friday as police opened a criminal negligence case into a stampede at a Hindu temple that killed 63 people.
The tragedy erupted Thursday when poor villagers, mainly women and children, scrambled for free food and clothing being given away at a ceremony at the temple in the small town of Kunda, on the northern plains of India's Uttar Pradesh state.
On Friday, the nearby villages were shrouded in grief.
In Piranagar, the bodies of two sisters, 8-year-old Vandana and 12-year-old Sanjana, were wrapped in white sheets and placed on slabs of ice in their small house until their father could return home from his job ironing clothes in the distant city of Mumbai.
Their mother, Bimla Devi, cried nearby among weeping relatives and neighbors.
"We knew that we would get an offering so we went," said their 15-year-old sister, Khushboo, who had gone to the temple with the girls and their mother. "Then we felt people starting to push us, and people started falling on top of us. In this madness, my two sisters died."
Hundreds of people gathered on the banks of the Ganges River, which devout Hindus regard as sacred, as families laid at least 10 bodies on wooden funeral pyres, cremated them and scattered their ashes.
In the village of Kazipur Maharajganj, mourners chanted religious hymns as they accompanied 48-year-old Phool Chand Saroj, a poor farmer who lost his mother and two children in the stampede. Saroj's wife, who he believed had also died, was found to be alive overnight.
The bodies were carried to nearby fields for burial.
The handouts in Kunda are an annual tradition arranged by local religious leader Kripalu Maharaj to mark the anniversary of his wife's death, a common practice in India.
Authorities accused the organizers of failing to take adequate security measures and opened a criminal negligence case against the temple management, Superintendent of Police S.M. Mishra said. Relatives complained organizers should have done a better job of controlling the crowds. Ashok Kumar, a local government official, said the temple had not asked permission to hold the event.
Rajnish Puri, a spokesman for the Jagat Kripalu Parishat trust that runs the temple, said he had informed local authorities about the event last Saturday, telling them they expected large numbers of people.
"But only two police constables were sent," he said in a statement.
Deadly stampedes are relatively common at temples in India, where large crowds - sometimes hundreds of thousands of people - gather in tiny areas with no safety measures or crowd control. In 2008, more than 145 people died in a stampede at a remote Hindu temple at the foothills of the Himalayas.