Negligence blamed for deadly crowd crush in Seoul

SEOUL — South Korean officials concluded their investigation of the Halloween crowd crush that killed nearly 160 people in Seoul, blaming the police and other government agencies for failing to take precautionary measures to avoid such a disaster and for bungling rescue operations.

The crush, one of the worst peacetime disasters in South Korean history, took place on the evening of Oct. 29, when throngs of Halloween revelers squeezed into a narrow, sloping alley in Itaewon, a popular nightlife district in central Seoul.

Three days later, the government of President Yoon Suk Yeol formed a special investigative unit, which has since raided dozens of police, fire department and other government offices, scrutinized reams of surveillance camera footage and interviewed hundreds of witnesses.

The unit has so far asked prosecutors to indict 23 people, about half of them police officers, on criminal charges. Most of the officers were accused of contributing to the deaths through negligence of official duty or fabricating or trying to destroy official documents.

“They knew that if a large crowd gathered there, it could lead to a safety accident,” said Son Je-han, the chief investigator, during a news briefing Friday to wrap up his team’s 74-day investigation. “But the police, local ward office, fire department, subway authorities and other agencies legally responsible for preventing disasters either did not establish any precautionary measures or their preparations were inadequate.”

On the day of the disaster, the crowd in Itaewon was so big that officials should have anticipated human casualties, Son said. Still, they ignored early calls from people on the street warning of a lack of crowd control. Once the disaster began to unfold, government agencies failed to adequately coordinate efforts or organize an efficient rescue operation and bungled emergency communications.

“It was the accumulation of mistakes and negligence by various agencies that combined to cause the large human casualties,” Son said.

In addition to the dead, nearly 200 people were injured.

Son’s team, an ad hoc group composed largely of police officers, operated as an arm of the national police, the very agency it was supposed to investigate. Even before it completed its investigation, victims’ families raised doubts about the group’s impartiality, though the unit claimed to have full autonomy.

Of the 23 criminal suspects that Son’s team asked prosecutors to indict, the highest-ranking official was Kim Kwang-ho, the chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police.