SEOUL —
South Korean police admitted Tuesday
their emergency response to a deadly Halloween crush had been “insufficient”,
with top officials saying crowd management failures had likely contributed to
the disaster.
اضافة اعلان
At least 156 mostly young people were killed, and
scores more injured, in a deadly crowd surge late Saturday at the first
post-pandemic Halloween party in
Seoul’s popular Itaewon nightlife district.
An estimated 100,000 people had flocked to the area,
but because it was not an “official” event with a designated organizer, neither
the police nor local authorities were actively managing the crowd.
“There were multiple reports to the police
indicating the seriousness at the site just before the accident occurred,”
national police chief Yoon Hee-keun said.
Police knew “a large crowd had gathered even before
the accident occurred, urgently indicating the danger,” he said, acknowledging
the way this information was handled had been “insufficient”.
Transcripts of emergency calls reported by South
Korean news agency News1 documented how desperate members of the public had
flagged dangerous overcrowding hours before disaster struck at around 10pm
local time Saturday.
At 8:09pm one caller told police: “There are too
many people here being pushed, trampled, hurt. It’s chaotic. You need to
control this.”
Seoul’s interior minister, who had been criticized
for earlier comments in which he claimed deploying more police would not have
prevented the crush, apologized Tuesday for the disaster.
Lee Sang-min expressed his “sincere apologies to the
public as the minister in charge of the people’s safety for this accident”,
before bowing his head before lawmakers and cameras.
He promised to investigate what had caused the crowd
crush and to ensure a disaster of this scale could never happen again.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon also made a public apology,
weeping as he said he felt “infinitely responsible for this accident”.
Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said Tuesday that a lack
of a proper crowd management system may have caused the incident, adding that a
full review was ongoing.
No crowd control
South Korea is typically
strong on crowd control, with protest rallies often so heavily policed that
officers can outnumber participants.
But police deployed only 137 officers to Itaewon for
Halloween, while 6,500 officers were present at a protest across town attended
by about 25,000 people, local reports said.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said Tuesday
the country needed to urgently improve its system for managing large crowds in
the wake of the disaster.
“The safety of the people is important, whether or
not there is an event organizer,” he told a cabinet meeting.
He called for the country to develop “cutting-edge
digital capabilities” to improve crowd management — but critics claim such
tools already exist and were not deployed in Itaewon.
Seoul’s City Hall has a real-time monitoring system
that uses mobile phone data to predict crowd size, but it was not employed
Saturday night, local media reported.
Itaewon’s district authorities also did not deploy
any safety patrols, with officials saying the Halloween event was considered “a
phenomenon” rather than “a festival”, which would have required an official
plan for crowd control.
On the night, tens of thousands of people thronged a
narrow alleyway, with eyewitnesses describing how, with no police or crowd
control in sight, confused partygoers pushed and shoved, crushing those trapped
in the lane.
Easy to prevent
Crowd management experts
told AFP that the disaster was easily avoidable, even with only a small number
of police officers.
“Good, safe crowd management is not about the ratio,
but about the crowd strategy — for safe crowd capacity, flow, density,” said G.
Keith Still, a crowd science professor at the University of Suffolk.
South Korean expert Lee Young-ju said that if local
police knew they would be short-handed, they could have sought help from local
authorities or even residents or shop owners.
“It’s not just the numbers,” Lee, a professor from
the Department of Fire and Disaster at the University of Seoul, told AFP.
“The question is, how did they manage with the
limited number (of police) and what kind of measures did they take to make up
for it.”
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