At least 102 persons were killed, and 44 were injured Friday night in the state of Kerala in southern India, when panic caused a stampede of pilgrims returning from a Hindi sanctuary, police reported.

Several hundred thousand worshippers gathered in Sabarimala shrine, on the last day of a religious festival.

The stampede was set off when a group of pilgrims in a jeep drove into a crowd of worshippers as they returned from offering prayers walking along a narrow forest path, said local police official Sanjay Kumar.

Deadly stampedes are relatively common at temples in India, where large crowds, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, gather in tiny areas with no safety measures or crowd control, AP reports.

In March last year in northern Uttar Pradesh state, 63 people were killed when villagers scrambled for free food and clothing being given away to the poor at a ceremony at a temple.

In 2008, more than 145 people died in a stampede at a remote Hindu temple at the foothills of the Himalayas, AP reminds.