By Mike Eckel and Sopheng Cheang
The Associated Press
Posted: 11/24/2010
Cambodian police examine hundreds of shoes and other belongings left behind on the bridge where at least 378 died Monday. "People were just walking here and there and all of a sudden, people started to run," one survivor said. (Tang Chhin Sothy, AFP/Getty Images)
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — At the bridge where investigators poked though the debris of a disaster — abandoned flip-flops and sneakers, water bottles, pieces of sugar cane — Chea Chan lit a Budd hist memorial offering of incense, coconut and lotus flowers, and wept.
The 28-year-old had tried to grab his younger brother during the riverside stampede that left at least 378 dead Monday night, but he was pushed against the support poles of the narrow suspension bridge. His little brother fell down and immediately was crushed under four or five other falling people.
He found his dead sibling at a local hospital, with a broken neck and crushed face. "I'm totally in shock," he said.
The victims were trampled when a crowd celebrating a holiday panicked for reasons that remained unknown Tuesday. The prime minister's special adviser, Om Yentieng, denied reports that it was sparked by a mass food poisoning, or by people being electrocuted by lighting cables.
Don Saron, 26, said she was walking across the bridge when people began shouting that it was going to collapse. She tripped and felt the crowds trampling over her face and chest.
"People were just walking here and there and all of sudden, people started to run," she said as she awaited treatment Tuesday at Calmette Hospital. She grimaced in pain as she leaned against a gurney on which she had just woken up nearly 20 hours after being caught in the stampede.
"I shouldn't have been there. Why did I come to this festival, this ceremony?" she said.
The city's police chief, Touch Naroth, said investigators were still trying to determine the cause but suggested that the bridge's small size may have contributed.
Tuesday, crowds jammed the sidewalk outside Calmette Hospital, looking for familiar faces in photos posted of unidentified victims.
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