[en] It is proposed that soft particle production in hadronic collisions is dominated by multiple gluon exchanges between partons from the colliding hadrons, followed by radiation of hadronic clusters from the coloured partons distributed uniformly in rapidity. This explains naturally two dominant features of the data: (a) the linear increase of rapidity spectra in the regions of limiting fragmentation and, (b) the proportionality between the increasing width of the limiting fragmentation region and the height of the central plateau