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In one moment, thousands of Halloween revelers crammed into the narrow, vibrant streets of Seoul’s most cosmopolitan neighborhood, eager to show off their capes, wizard hats and bat wings.
In the next, panic spread as an unmanageable mass of people jammed into a narrow alley in Itaewon. Toppled revelers stacked on one another „like dominoes“ in a chaotic crush so intense that clothes were ripped off.
A stunned Seoul was just beginning on Monday to put together the huge scope of the crowd surge that killed mostly people in their 20s and 30s, including foreign nationals, on Saturday night. As of Sunday evening, officials put the death toll at 153 and the number of injured people at 133. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety said it expected the death toll to rise on account of the number of injured people in serious conditions.
Witnesses say the nightmarish scene intensified as people performed CPR on the dying and carried limp bodies to ambulances, while dance music pulsed from garish clubs lit in bright neon. Others tried desperately to pull out those who were trapped underneath the crush of people, but failed because too many in the crowd had fallen on top of them.
Some people were unable to move at all for 40 minutes.
“We were just stuck together so tightly we couldn’t even shift to call out and report the situation,” said one witness, surnamed Lee.
