For a moment, young people crowd the narrow streets of Seoul to celebrate Halloween. The next moment, a movement of panic spreads through the crowd. Two days after the stampede that claimed the lives of 154 people on Saturday evening in South Korea, one question remains: how could the evening have turned out so badly?
Nicknamed “Three Alleys”, the heart of Itaewon can be summed up in a few narrow alleys in which most of the shops, restaurants, bars and clubs of the district are crammed. Saturday evening, the place is full of people. For the first time for two years and the Covid-19 epidemic, Koreans can again celebrate Halloween. Each establishment organizes its own evening, thousands of young people crowd the streets dressed in their best costumes and they spread the word: c This is the place to be to party. Everything is full, people send each other photos and videos of the crowd as an invitation and the revelers keep pouring in. Until no one is left cannot move.
According to estimates, one hundred thousand people are present in the streets. A high figure, but not unusual. Interviewed by the BBC, Jennifer Moon, editor-in-chief of the Korean information platform Arirang, assures that it is not uncommon for the Itaewon district to be so crowded. It was the same in previous editions. “I worked there. On Halloween, I couldn’t even go home after work because there were so many people”, confirms Jay C on Twitter.
The crowd gathered in front of the emergency services on the evening of the tragedy. © AFP
“A sea of people”
It is unknown what triggered the incident. The aisles are narrow – often no more than 4 meters wide – and are not designed to accommodate so many passers-by. If no one moves, everything is fine. But when the crowd begins to move, it is impossible to stop it and panic sets in.
In many videos filmed that evening, you can see people struggling to catch their breath, squeezed against the wall of the huge Hamilton Hotel, to the right of the alley where the stampede took place. But also the security guards of a bar who hold with all their might the signs that form the entrance to their establishment, who threaten to let go in the face of the weight of crowded revelers.
In the columns of the New York Times, Janelle, an English teacher in the Korean capital, says she saw a “sea of people” heading towards her. “It happened so suddenly.” At the top, the crowd tries to force their way through, even though the street is already packed. And down below, people are falling “on top of each other”. A tragedy that claimed the lives of 154 people. Most of the victims are people in their twenties, mostly women, who fell into respiratory distress and for whom the emergency services arrived too late.
It is one of the biggest disasters to hit South Korea in decades – the deadliest being the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, which killed 304 people on board, including 250 students on school trips.
The alley where the stampede took place that claimed the lives of 154 people on Saturday evening in Seoul. © AFP
A monk prays in front of a makeshift memorial outside a subway station in Seoul’s Itaewon district. © AFP
What did the police do?
Now authorities are trying to figure out what went wrong. On the side of the population, we point the finger at the police. Usually, in Seoul, the slightest event leads to a significant police presence. But this time, according to a report by the English-language daily Korea Joong Ang, there was “no crowd control”. Many officers had been deployed to monitor political demonstrations elsewhere and those present in Itaewon seemed unprepared to face such a human tide.
For its part, the police acknowledge having sent only 137 officers to the neighborhood on Saturday evening, while stressing that this figure was higher than those of the Halloween celebrations of previous years. But local media pointed out that most of these police were there to prevent drug use, not to channel the crowd.
A witness told the BBC that at the height of the evening, police climbed onto the roof of their vehicle in a desperate attempt to push back the people who continued to flock to Itaewon metro station, to no avail.
Deadly movement
Many survivors claim that people suddenly started pushing them hard. Itaewon is a hilly area. At the top of the slope from where the alley begins, a group of young people would have started pushing people down, unaware of the tragedy that was about to occur. “If my friend hadn’t held me and helped me, I think I would have passed out,” Seon Yeo-jeng wrote on his Instagram account. “People started falling like dominoes,” another survivor tweeted.
In the local daily Korea Joong Ang, journalist Anthony Spaeth describes how he narrowly escaped death. Drawn in by the movement of the crowd, he says he “lost contact with the ground”. For nearly twenty minutes, he was dragged by this human tide, until he managed to get out. He came to his senses in a night shop, then walked home past ambulances. “Meanwhile, in many bars the party continued as if nothing had happened.”
