Shanghai New Year stampede kills 36(2)

Dirty shoe prints covered her son's clothes when the 12-year-old boy came to safety.

"The crowd was in a panic. We stood in the crowd, feeling squeezed and almost out of breath," another witness, surnamed Yu, said. "Some yelled for help, but the noise was too loud."

Other survivors said police rushed to the scene and tried to pull out people who were stuck, but without much success.

"The chaos lasted several minutes, then some of the injured were seen being carried out of the crowd," Yu said.

"MONEY THROWING"

Some survivors said the stampede was triggered when people started to throw coupons resembling U.S. banknotes to revelers outside a bar on the windy night.

Witness Wu Tao said some coupons were being thrown from a building's third-floor window near the Bund, and people standing along the river bank started to scramble for the coupons.

The coupons looked like U.S. hundred dollar bills with "M18" printed in the middle, referring to a bar of the same name on the Bund.

Phone calls to the bar were immediately hung up after being answered.

Some said on social media that they found pictures of the bar owner showing off the coupons before the incident.

But the blogger, who called herself "Chaojidadadashabao_MissShen" on Sina Weibo, denied she threw any coupons in the incident.

IMMEDIATE PROBE

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday demanded an immediate investigation into the cause of a stampede and urged prevention of such incidents in the future.

The city has set up a working team for rescue operations and to deal with the aftermath.

The local authorities told Xinhua that one of the victims was a female student from the Shanghai-based Fudan University, one of China's most prestigious universities. The student, surnamed Du from Yunnan Province, was fatally injured during the incident and died later in the hospital.

Fatal incidents like this one were not rare in China, the world's most populous country. Stampedes in the past were mainly due to safety loopholes.

In September 2014, six students were killed in a stampede at a primary school in Yunnan Province after a stairway was blocked. In January 2014, a mosque stampede killed 14 people and injured another 10 in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. In 2004, a stampede on a bridge in suburban Beijing killed 37 during a local lantern festival.