Thousands of desperate relatives besieged a morgue in Ghana's capital yesterday. They were attempting to identify victims of a stadium stampede in which at least 126 people died after police fired tear-gas canisters at the crowd.
Some of the crowd shouted anti-police slogans. A senior police spokesman said an internal inquiry had begun.
Ghana's state news agency said 126 dead had been reported by officials at six hospitals in Accra. A local radio station earlier said at least 130 people had died, including several Muslims taken for immediate burial in accordance with Islamic rites.
The identification process was slow, with guards only allowing five people at a time into the morgue. At one stage, a crowd of several hundred people tried to force open the gate leading to the compound.
Every so often distraught relatives came from the mortuary crying and screaming. Ghanaian authorities promised an impartial inquiry into the disaster, which spectators said was caused by police firing tear gas. The police action was apparently a response to fans who hurled missiles at the end of Wednesday's game between Ghana's two leading teams, Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko.
Survivors claimed yesterday they had begged the police not to fire tear gas into the crowd, but their pleas had gone unheeded.
Spectators said panic ripped through the crowd when police fired the tear gas.
"Kotoko fans started throwing the plastic chairs onto the pitch. But they were not angry with Hearts of Oak supporters - they were angry with the referee," an injured man said. "We started begging the police not to fire any tear gas again. But they went ahead."
As thousands of people desperately rushed for the exit, many were crushed in the stampede. Others suffocated.
"There were a lot of people on top of me," the injured man said. "One guy started foaming at the mouth, another had blood coming out of his mouth. There was a lot of weight on me because I was on the rail."
Mr Harry Zakour, chief executive of Hearts of Oak, yesterday criticised police for firing up to a dozen tear-gas canisters. "One would have been enough to scare the public," he said. "It's a very sad story. We will have to set up a committee to see what went wrong."
It was the continent's third deadly stadium disaster in a month and raises questions about African hopes of hosting the 2010 World Cup finals.
President John Kufuor summoned his cabinet for an emergency meeting and his aides said that a period of national mourning would be declared.
Mr Kufuor, who was once Kotoko's club chairman, was clearly very shaken during a visit to the injured. He told reporters simply: "This is really sad." An aide said the President had screamed when he first heard the news.
On April 11th, 43 soccer fans were crushed to death when fans tried to force their way into Johannesburg's huge Ellis Park stadium midway through a top South African league match.
At least seven people were killed and 51 seriously injured on April 30th in a stampede in the Democratic Republic of Congo after police moved to break up rioting at a match in Lubumbashi.