SEOUL: South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol declared a period of national mourning on Sunday (Oct 30) after a Halloween crush killed about 151 people in a packed nightlife area in Seoul.
Yoon expressed condolences to the victims, mostly teenagers and people in their 20s, and his wishes for a speedy recovery to the injured.
“This is truly tragic,” he said in a statement. “A tragedy and disaster that should not have happened took place in the heart of Seoul last night.”
The crowd surge and crush happened in the capital’s popular Itaewon district, where local reports said as many as 100,000 people had gone to celebrate Halloween on Saturday night, clogging the area’s narrow alleyways and winding streets.
Choi Sung-beom, head of the Yongsan Fire Station, said 151 deaths had been confirmed, including 19 foreigners. He told a briefing at the scene that 82 people were injured, 19 of them seriously.
“The high number of casualties was the result of many being trampled during the Halloween event,” Choi said, adding that the death toll could climb.
He also said all the deaths were likely from the crush in the single narrow alley.
It was the first Halloween event in Seoul in three years after the country lifted COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing. Many of the partygoers were wearing masks and Halloween costumes.
“A number of people fell during a Halloween festival, and we have a large number of casualties,” Choi said. Many of those killed were near a nightclub.
Many of the victims were women in their 20s, while the foreigners killed included people from China, Iran, Uzbekistan and Norway.
Eye-witnesses described scrambling to get out of the suffocating crowd as people ended up piling on top of one another, with paramedics, quickly overwhelmed by the number of victims, asking passers-by to administer first aid.
“There were so many people just being pushed around and I got caught in the crowd and I couldn’t get out at first too,” 30-year-old Jeon Ga-eul told AFP. “I felt like an accident was bound to happen.”
Moon Ju-young, 21, said there were clear signs of trouble in the alleys before the incident.
“It was at least more than 10 times crowded than usual,” he told Reuters.