Grieving relatives of about 1,000 Iraqis killed in Wednesday’s stampede combed hospitals and morgues on Thursday for missing loved ones as the nation grieved over a tragedy, which has overshadowed the daily trauma of war.The stampede on a bridge over the river Tigris in Baghdad saw the greatest loss of Iraqi life in a single incident since the 2003 war to oust Saddam Hussein.Three days of official mourning will quieten a country inured to mass killing on its streets but shocked by the disaster. At least 965 people are known to have died when thousands of Shi’ite pilgrims taking part in a religious festival rushed for imagined safety onto the bridge, only to die in the river below or be crushed on the roadway.A barrage of mortar and rocket attacks on the crowd, some 200,000 strong, had added to the tension early in the day. It killed seven people and was claimed by a Sunni group avowing links to the insurgency against the US-backed, Shia-led government.The final toll, a senior official said, was likely to be over 1,000, once all bodies scattered in hospitals, makeshift morgues and family homes across the city were counted. Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari ordered the payment of $2,000 to the family of each victim of the disaster.Jaafari, apparently accepting that the stampede was inspired by Sunni radicals bent on exploiting sectarian divides, vowed tough action against them. ‘‘The coming period will witness a strategic development in confronting terror and terrorists. And we will hit hard at those murderers, radical militants and Saddamists,’’ he said in a statement on Thursday.The road to Najaf was choked with coffins loaded onto minivans and coaches. Most victims were women and children who died by drowning or being trampled, an Interior Ministry official said. It was the biggest loss of life in such a crowd since more than 1,400 pilgrims died at Mecca during the Haj in 1990. —Reuters
