A stampede at a world music festival in the Moroccan capital Rabat, which featured pop stars such as Kylie Minogue, left at least 11 people dead, most of them women and children, police said yesterday.

The accident occurred shortly after midnight on the final night of the Mawazine (Rhythms) festival, where some 70,000 spectators were at the Hay Nahda stadium to see home favourite Abdelaziz Stati sing.

About 3,000 uniformed and plain-clothed officers were at the event.

Police said the crowd surging towards one of the exits appeared to have brought down a wire fence, setting off the stampede as the concert ended.

Five women, four men and two children were later found dead, apparently having suffocated in the crush. A source close to the case said all those who died were Moroccan.

Rescuers rushed to the scene to pull out survivors and transport the injured to Rabat's main hospital, Ibn Sina, where a source said all but seven of the injured had left by yesterday morning.

"Most of the injured are young," Abdelatif Benchekroun, the hospital's head of emergency care, said.

But another hospital source said that some of those injured were in a critical condition. Hassan Amrani, the prefect of the Rabat region, travelled to the hospital to oversee the rescue and treatment operation, the MAP agency reported.

A source close to the city council said Stati's concert, which was free, had originally been scheduled to be held in Moulay el Hassan Square in central Rabat.

But it was switched to the stadium to accommodate the large number of fans, mainly young people, said the source, close to the security services.

The concert started later than scheduled, at around 11 p.m. on Saturday.

As the other concerts ended, including one given by US star Stevie Wonder, more people moved over to catch the end of Stati's late-running concert, creating an unexpected increase in numbers.

At the end of the concert, a group of young spectators climbed over a stretch of wire fencing which collapsed under their weight, causing the panic and a stampede that led to the deaths.