At least 153 people were killed and dozens more hurt in an apparent crowd surge at packed Halloween festivities in the South Korean capital of Seoul, local officials said.
Three South Korean military personnel were among those killed in an apparent crowd surge at the popular Seoul nightclub district in Itaewon on Saturday night.
Four other South Korean military personnel were injured in the incident and are being treated in hospital, a Korean defense ministry official told CNN on Sunday.
Fire officials said most of the victims were women and young people in their 20s and included 19 foreigners from Iran, Uzbekistan, China and Norway.
It has also been confirmed that the dead includes one Norwegian and one Sri Lankan national, as well as two Japanese victims.
Four Chinese nationals were among the 151 people killed during Halloween festivities in Seoul, with two others suffering minor injuries, Chinese state news agency Xinhua has reported.
A further 82 people were also injured, 19 of them seriously.
The Yonhap news agency called the disaster, which happened shortly after 10pm local (13:00GMT) when a huge crowd thronged a narrow alley near the Hamilton Hotel, the deadliest such incident in South Korean history.
It happened at the first Halloween celebrations in Seoul in three years, after the country lifted COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing. Tens of thousands of partygoers, wearing masks and Halloween costumes, had reportedly gone to Itaewon for the event.
The cause of the crush was not immediately clear, though some local media said it happened after a large group of people rushed to a bar in the area after hearing an unidentified celebrity visited there.
Witnesses described scrambling to get out of the suffocating crowd in the downhill alley as people ended up piling on top of one another.
“People kept pushing down into a downhill club alley, resulting in other people screaming and falling down like dominos,” one unidentified witness was quoted as saying by the Yonhap news agency.
“I thought I would be crushed to death too as people kept pushing without realizing there were people falling down at the start of the stampede.”
“There were so many people just being pushed around and I got caught in the crowd and I couldn’t get out at first too,” 30-year-old Jeon Ga-eul told the AFP news agency.
“I felt like an accident was bound to happen.”
Babette Vanderhaeghen, a Belgian resident of Seoul, told the Korea Joong Ang Daily newspaper that she escaped the melee.
“We thought we were going to die because there were far too many people,” she said.
Another survivor blamed owners of bars and clubs for the high death toll, accusing them of blocking people trying to escape the crush.
“It looks like the casualties were more severe as people attempted to escape to nearby stores but were kicked out back to the street because business hours were over,” the survivor who asked not to be named told Yonhap.
Videos and images from the immediate aftermath showed chaotic scenes of fire officials and citizens treating dozens of people who appeared to be unconscious.
Footage from later on in the evening showed dozens of bodies spread on the pavement covered by bed sheets and emergency workers dressed in orange vests loading even more bodies on stretchers into ambulances.
Seoul Metropolitan Police said they have confirmed the identities of nearly all those killed in an apparent crowd surge at Seoul’s popular nightclub district Itaewon on Saturday.
The identities of 150 people killed have been confirmed, police told CNN on Sunday. The death toll from the disaster stands at 153.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government had said they had received 4,024 missing persons reports as of 5 p.m. local time (4 a.m. ET), though some of these reports could relate to the same people.
Police said there is no active search for those reported missing as they believe no one went missing from the scene. They said thousands of missing person reports have been used to help identify those killed in the incident.
The three bodies who have yet to be identified are all young women whose nationalities have yet to be verified, they added.
Reacting to the news, South Korean Minister of Interior and Safety, Lee Sang-min said: “We understand that it was not a problem that could have been solved by deploying police or firefighters in advance,” Lee said.
He added that there had been “various disturbances and demonstrations” in other parts of Seoul on Saturday.
“It was expected that many citizens would gather so a considerable number of police and security forces were deployed to Gwanhwanmun (another area of Seoul),” he said.
However, in Itaewon, the crowd had not been unusually large, he said, so only a “normal” level of security forces had been deployed there.
The Asian country’s President Yoon Suk-yeol has declared a period of national mourning following the deadly Halloween crush in Seoul.
“This is truly tragic,” Yoon said in a statement on Sunday, hours after some 151 people were killed in a crowd crush in Seoul’s Itaewon district.
“The government will designate the period from today until the accident is brought under control as a period of national mourning,” he said.
