Football tragedy sparks better safety, policing demands

Ghana's worst football disaster, which killed at least 126 people, triggered calls Saturday for revamped stadiums and better policing at jampacked stadiums.

On Wednesday, at least 126 fans died and 54 were injured in a stampede at the Accra Sports Stadium at the end of a local league game between arch-rivals Accra Hearts of Oak and Kumasi Ashanti Kotoko.

The stampede started after police repeatedly fired tear gas shells to quell rioting supporters of the losing side, Kumasi Ashanti Kotoko.

The spectators were trapped as the exit gates were still locked at the end of the game and there were high iron grills separating the stands from the pitch, in contravention of FIFA standards.

Twenty years ago, nine fans died when the same teams clashed at the Kumasi Stadium.

And last December, one person died after police fired tear gas into the stands during the African Champions Cup final against Tunisian club Esperance.

The latest soccer tragedy has been blamed on a variety of factors -- poor crowd control by the police, lack of emergency facilities and structural defects at the stadium and finally overreaction by police.

George Brocke, chief executive of Ghana's National Sports Council (NSC), said the police were to blame.

"The police tear gas might have led to this," said the NSC boss, denying reports that the exit gates were still locked after the match.

Ghana Football Association official Worlango Agra added: "The forces we use at these games should have been a little bit more cautious.

"Incidents of the use of tear gas by the police have become too many. The three most recent incidents at the Accra Stadium, the police fired tear gas when something else could have been done."

National Sports Council spokesman Hama Issakah told AFP that the stairs leading in and out of the 30,000-capacity stadium were "too steep and narrow," forcing more than 3,000 spectators to be trapped at the exit gates on Wednesday.

"Too many of the fans fell over each other on the steep, narrow stairwells. I saw people trapped fighting for their young lives," Issakah said.

An AFP correspondent toured the stadium Saturday to discover other structural defects. There were no lights around the exits, metal railings in the staircase were broken and there were fences around the stands.

"The stadium was not properly built despite hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the renovation done on it for the Ghana-Nigeria African Nations Cup last year," said a stadium official on condition of anonymity.

Officials from both the Hearts and Kotoko clubs alleged that help for the dying and injured did not come in time, worsening the situation.

The Ghanaian government has set up a five-man commission of inquiry to investigate the disaster. The commission will submit its findings in four weeks.