Rescue officials load a stretcher with a victim of a Halloween crush, which left no less than 150 people dead, into an ambulance within the district of Itaewon in Seoul on October 30, 2022.
Anthony Wallace | AFP | Getty Images
South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol declared a period of national mourning on Sunday after a Halloween crush killed some 153 people in a packed nightlife area in Seoul.
Yoon expressed condolences to the victims, mostly teenagers and other people of their 20s, and his wishes for a speedy recovery to the numerous injured in one in all South Korea’s worst disasters and the world’s worst stampedes in a long time.
“This is really tragic,” he said in an announcement. “A tragedy and disaster that shouldn’t have happened took place in the guts of Seoul last night.”
An enormous crowd celebrating in the favored Itaewon district surged into an alley on Saturday night, emergency officials said, adding the death toll could rise.
Choi Sung-beom, head of the Yongsan Fire Station, told a briefing on the scene that 82 people were injured, 19 of them seriously. The deaths included 22 foreigners, he said.
Families and friends desperately sought word of family members at community centers that had grow to be makeshift facilities for missing individuals.
You’d see big crowds at Christmas and fireworks … but this was several ten-folds larger than any of that.
As of midday, the Interior Ministry said no less than 90% of the victims had been identified, with delays affecting some foreign nationals and teenagers who didn’t yet have identification cards.
South Korean tech and mobile game firms including Kakao and NCSOFT pulled their Halloween promotions after the tragedy, while amusement park Everland cancelled Halloween-themed events. Many regional governments and organisations have cancelled or reduced festivals and other celebrations.
Unruliness, then chaos
It was the primary Halloween event in Seoul in three years to be virtually freed from Covid-19 restrictions and social distancing. Most of the partygoers were wearing masks and Halloween costumes.
Twenty-four hours before, there have been already warning signs that the festivities were attracting dangerous numbers of individuals, and victims and their relatives questioned an apparent lack of crowd control.
The belongings of victims are seen on the scene of a deadly stampede during a Halloween festival on October 30, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea, where no less than 150 people have thus far been reported killed and dozens more were injured.
Chung Sung-jun | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Early on Sunday costumes and private belongings mingled with blood spots within the narrow street. Survivors huddled under emergency blankets amid throngs of emergency staff, police, and media.
Lots of those killed were near a nightclub, Choi said. Most of the victims were women of their 20s, while the foreigners killed included people from China, Iran, Uzbekistan and Norway, he said.
Witnesses described the gang becoming increasingly unruly and agitated because the evening deepened. Chaos erupted just before the ten:20 p.m. (1320 GMT) stampede, with police readily available for the event at times struggling to manage the crowds, witnesses said.
Moon Ju-young, 21, said there have been clear signs of trouble within the alley before the incident. He told Reuters it was greater than 10 times as crowded as usual.
Social media footage showed lots of of individuals packed within the narrow, sloped alley crushed and immobile as emergency officials and police tried to drag them free.
People comfort one another after a stampede at a packed Halloween event in central Seoul, early on October 30, 2022 kills greater than 150 people, lots of them women of their 20s.
Anthony Wallace | Afp | Getty Images
Choi, the Yongsan district fire chief, said all of the deaths were likely from the crush within the alley.
Makeshift morgue
Fire officials and witnesses said people continued to pour into the alley after it was already packed wall-to-wall, when those at the highest of the slope fell, sending people below them toppling over others.
One woman said her daughter, pulled from the crush of individuals, survived after being trapped for greater than an hour.
A makeshift morgue was arrange in a constructing next to the scene. About 4 dozen bodies were wheeled out on wheeled stretchers and moved to a government facility to discover the victims, in accordance with a Reuters witness.
The Itaewon district is popular with young South Koreans and expatriates alike, its dozens of bars and restaurants packed on Saturday for Halloween after businesses had suffered a pointy decline over three years of the pandemic.
“You’d see big crowds at Christmas and fireworks … but this was several ten-folds larger than any of that,” Park Jung-hoon, 21, told Reuters from the scene.
International leaders offered condolences, including U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping, who noted that Chinese were among the many dead and injured.
With the easing of the Covid pandemic, curfews on bars and restaurants and a limit of 10 people for personal gatherings were lifted in April. An out of doors mask mandate was dropped in May.
President Yoon held an emergency meeting with senior aides and ordered a task force be set as much as secure resources to treat the injured and launch an intensive investigation into the reason behind the disaster.
The disaster is among the many country’s deadliest since a 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304 people, mainly highschool students.
The sinking of the Sewol, and criticism of the official response, sent shockwaves across South Korea, prompting widespread soul-searching over safety measures within the country which are prone to be renewed within the wake of Saturday’s crush.