At least 149 people have died in a crush as huge Halloween crowds surged into a narrow street in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, officials say.
At least 76 were injured in the incident in the Itaewon nightlife area which was holding its first unmasked Halloween celebrations since Covid.
Reports describe a desperate scene of people caught up in the crush piling on top of each other.
The cause of the disaster is still being investigated.
After holding an emergency meeting, South Korea’s President, Yoon Suk-yeol, ordered a task force to be set up to help treat the injured.
He also launched an investigation into the cause of the crush.
Several world leaders have expressed their condolences. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron said their thoughts were with the people of South Korea.
The EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he was deeply saddened and the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, pledged American support.
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While Halloween is not a big celebration in South Korea overall, Itaewon, a district with an international cultural feel, would have been a peak party location for the festival on Saturday.
Many young people were there, some of them dressed in Halloween costumes, out to party and go clubbing.
Instead, the area descended into chaos and people were left distraught and grieving as victims lay under blue sheets and emergency services did their work.
Videos from Itaewon show body bags placed on the streets, emergency workers performing CPR, and rescuers trying to pull out people trapped beneath others.
Jeon Ga-eul, 30, was having a drink at a bar at the moment the crush began.
“My friend said: something terrible is happening outside,” she told AFP news agency. “I said: what are you talking about? And then I went outside to see and there were people doing CPR in the street.”
Most of the dead were in their teens or 20s, said Choi Seong-beom, chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department. Of the injured, 19 were seriously hurt and 57 lightly.
Two foreign nationals are among the dead and 15 foreigners were injured, he added.
The high number of casualties was a result of “many being trampled”, the fire chief said.
One video appears to show hundreds of people packed tightly together in a narrow, sloping road in the district. In another, emergency responders try to pull out people from what appears to be a pile of bodies. Cries of distress can be heard.
Bodies were being sent to nearby gyms and hospitals to be identified by family members.
All available emergency responders in Seoul have been mobilised, according to the National Fire agency.
A doctor who administered first aid at the scene said that when he had first started performing CPR there were two victims but “the number exploded soon after, outnumbering the first responders”.
Some 100,000 revellers are said to have been in the area on Saturday evening.
Social media messages posted earlier in the evening showed some people remarking that the Itaewon area was so crowded that it felt unsafe.
One witness, Park Jung-Hoon, told Reuters news agency that big crowds were normal for Christmas and fireworks celebration but “this was several ten-folds bigger than any of that”.
A local journalist said that an emergency broadcast had been sent to every mobile phone in the Yongsan District urging citizens to return home as soon as possible due to “an emergency accident near Hamilton Hotel in Itaewon”.