How festive night in Seoul turned into a tragedy
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — It was supposed to be a festive evening, throngs of raucous youngsters dressed as zombies, princesses and super heroes converging on one of Seoul’s most popular nightlife districts for their first restriction-free Halloween celebration since the pan- demic began.
Late Saturday evening, they crowded into bars and nightclubs pumping out the latest K-pop hits and spilled out into the tight alleys that wind through the city’s Itae- won neighborhood.
As the night grew more frenetic and the mass of revelers swelled, many of them crammed into an alleyway barely 11 feet wide, in a bottleneck of human traffic that made it difficult to breathe and move. There were few police officers around, and from within the crowd came calls to “push, push” and a big shove, according to witnesses. Then, they began to fall, a tangle of too many bodies, compressed into too small of a space.
In the end, more than 150 people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, died, crushed under the surge of the crowd.
The tragedy — one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters — and questions about the authorities’ responsibility to manage the crowd has marred the image of South Korea, a thriving technology and pop-culture powerhouse that is chronically prone to man-made disasters. It has also added to political woes of the country’s beleaguered president, Yoon Suk Yeol, already suffering low approval ratings with a growing number of people out on the street demanding his resignation.
As the sun set on Itaewon on Sunday evening, a mournful and subdued atmosphere suffused the neighborhood. Police closed the streets to traffic in the area, where shuttered bars and restaurants put up signs of condolences.