A woman is stampeded to death in Nakhon Si Thammarat
A 51-year-old woman was stampeded to death and dozens others were injured Monday morning, after thousands of people forced their way to buy coupon for the much-sought-after Jatukham Rammathep amulets in a school in Nakhon Si Thammarat's Muang district.
The incident prompted the Religious Affairs Department to call for safer public distribution of the famous amulets and ask private sector to postpone the distribution of the amulets.Thousands of people had been waiting since Sunday midnight at three coupon-selling spots at Nakhon Si Thammarat Technical College, Rama XI park, and Thanakhonyanwaropasuthit School to get the amulets' special edition produced by Wat Phra Nakhon. The crowd caused a five-kilometre traffic jams in the city. At about 8am, nearly 10,000 forced their way into the coupon desk at the technical school's second floor. Many women and elderly people fainted and trampled by the crowd. Officials had to pull out the injured from the stream of crowd and found that the fainted Pheun Khongpetch, 51, was trampled to death with footprints all over her body while dozens others were injured. The college's gate and fences were destroyed. At Rama XI Park, people also literary broke through the alloy fence's gate of to get a hold on the coupons. The chaos - that went beyond hundreds policemen's control - had prompted the coupon selling to stop. The Nation
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