No measure had been taken to control the crowd in the Seoul district where 154 people died in the night from Saturday to Sunday.
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Declared by the South Korean authorities Special disaster zone, Itaewon was closed to the public on Monday October 31. Televisions, however, broadcast images of the lane in the festive district of Seoul, where 154 young people, including 26 foreigners, dotted and trampled in a crowd movement during Halloween celebrations, in the middle of the night of 29 to 30 october. Still strewn with pieces of red fabric, multicolored bags and a pumpkin with a macabre smile, the steel steep barely 4 meters wide, usually teeming, is only silence.
a Itaewon as in the rest of South Korea, the time is for meditation. All the festivities and other concerts planned in the country have been canceled. The conservative president, Yoon Seok-Youl, who declared a national mourning until November 5, went on Monday, with his wife, Kim Keon-Hee, to the altar installed in front of the town hall of the South Korean capital. The couple filed flowers and observed a moment of silence. The manager has canceled all his commitments to focus on the consequences of what the South Korean press already calls the “Halloween nightmare”.
A nightmare described on social networks or in the press by survivors: “People were crying for their lives, but no one could move.” “I thought I was going to die. My whole body was stuck among All the others, while people laughed with a terrace and filmed us. “A Itewon bar employee told the Yonhap agency how he helped firefighters transport a” fifty bodies “, and expressed his Recognition of having “been able to free a living person stuck under several corpses”.
The nightmare is also that of the relatives of the victims, some of which have been faced with terrible difficulties in knowing the fate of their child. A father, also quoted in the local media, says he wandered at length in hospitals where the wounded had been transferred, including the University Hospital Soonchunhyang, in Seoul, in search of his daughter of which he had no news. He finally learned that his body rested in a hospital in the province of Gyeonggi, neighbor of Seoul.
youth celebration
The mourning is accompanied by controversies, in particular on the broadcasting of images and videos of deceased people, “which should be prohibited”, underlines in his editorial of October 31 the conservative daily Juongang. Nam Young-Hee, a leaders of the opposition Democratic Party, is criticized for having allocated the responsibility of the disaster on the transfer in July, in July, by Yoon Suk-Yeol, of the South Korean presidency in the district Yongsan, which would have the consequence of mobilizing significant police resources. She then removed her message.
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