About 60 people have been crushed to death in a stampede outside a stadium in Ivory Coast's main city of Abidjan after a New Year's Eve fireworks display.
The incident took place near Félix Houphouët-Boigny stadium where a crowd had gathered to watch fireworks, emergency officials said.
One of the injured, speaking to Reuters at a hospital, said security forces had arrived to break up the crowd, triggering a panic in which many people fell over and were trampled.
"The provisional death toll is 60 and there are 49 injured," the interior minister, Hamed Bakayoko, said in a statement on national television.
President Alassane Ouattara, visiting injured people at the hospital, called the incident a national tragedy and said an investigation was under way to determine what had happened.
A Reuters correspondent said bloodstains and abandoned shoes littered the scene outside the stadium on Tuesday morning.
The incident was the worst of its kind in Abidjan since 2010, when a stampede at a stadium during a football match killed 18 people.
Ivory Coast, once a stable economic hub for west Africa, is struggling to recover from a 2011 civil war in which more than 3,000 people were killed.
Tuesday 1 January 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/01/scores-killed-ivory-coast-fireworks-crush
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