MIND YOUR STEP

Crowd behaviour is often difficult to understand:

An Iraq minister has blamed insurgents for triggering a stampede in which nearly 650 Iraqi Shiites were killed after being panicked by rumours a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up.

Such crowd related deaths are something of a Muslim tradition:

In 1990, 1426 people were killed in a crowd crush during the annual pilgrimage of 2 million at Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The crush occurred in a 500 m long tunnel joining Mecca and the Tent City of Mina. Temperatures at the time were 44 deg. C outside the air-conditioned tunnel. It is speculated that someone fell in the tunnel blocking movement.

Maybe it's a cultural thing.