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NEWS: Two dozen Hindu pilgrims die on cold Himalaya trek
In clari.world.asia.india, C-reuters@clari.net (Reuters) wrote:
SRINAGAR, India (Reuter) - Two dozen Hindu pilgrims have
died of exposure while trekking to a Kashmiri cave said to house
a frozen manifestation of the god Shiva's sexual organ, Indian
police said Friday.
Police in Srinagar, summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir
state, said 24 devotees had died since Thursday after heavy rain
and snow stranded some 70,000 pilgrims on the route to the
13,000-foot high cave.
A further 12 pilgrims had died earlier on the annual
5qilgrimage, which started on Aug. 16 and ends next Wednesday.
Officials said some 112,000 Hindus had arrived in Kashmir
this year to visit the Amarnath cave, where devotees worship an
ice stalagmite believed to be a manifestation of the ``lingam,''
or phallus, of the Hindu god Shiva.
Movement along the route came to a standstill as 20 inches
of rain fell over 24 hours beginning Thursday, officials said.
The temperature in Pahalgam, the last staging point along
the pilgrims' route some 60 miles south of Srinagar, had fallen
to freezing, they said.
The trek snakes past Pahalgam, through the Lidder valley and
30 miles through the mountains to the cave.
``People walking through the forests of Pahalgam have been
exposed to extreme cold,'' a police official said. ``It is
raining heavily along the route. All the roads to Pahalgam are
flooded. There are snowfalls in the upper reaches of the
mountains.''
Last year the pilgrimage was threatened by Muslim separatist
guerrillas, who staged two bomb attacks on the heavily guarded
pilgrims, who rely on ponies to climb the upper reaches. A state
civil servant was killed in one of the blasts.
Some 20,000 people have died since a separatist revolt broke
out in 1990 in Jammu and Kashmir, mainly-Hindu India's only
Muslim majority state.
This year guerrillas issued no ban on the pilgrimage.
Instead, the weather has posed a challenge.
In the state's winter capital Jammu, authorities said floods
and landslides set off by torrential rains had forced them to
close the 185-mile highway to Srinagar.
