Seoul police admitted that hours before the distress it was known that things were not going well in the Itaewon entertainment district. At least 11 emergency calls came from pedestrians who saw how it was Getting busier and busier at the Halloween party, The first is around 6:30 pm. That was four hours before something really went wrong. There were about 100,000 people in the neighborhood, most of them packed into one narrow street.

Transcripts of the conversations have also been released. For example, the first caller indicated that a lot of people are in and out of the area, and that it sounds intimidating. “I think they can be crushed to death,” he already recorded. The caller begged the police to intervene, but they did not.

This has caused a lot of criticism of the local police forces in South Korea. Relatives are also angry. No clear answer has yet been given as to why the police did not intervene. Things went wrong around midnight when panic erupted among the crowd, killing 156 and injuring 157 in hospitals.

On social media, survivors share what they experienced amidst the crowds. Choi Young-gyu describes how he was kidnapped and separated from his friends by a wave of corpses. Moments later, the crowd fell like dominoes. They were caught between a strip of stores on one side and the Hamilton Hotel on the other.

According to a police spokesperson, 137 officers were deployed on Saturday, already much more than the 34 to 90 men in the years before the Corona pandemic crippled nightlife.

“I will do everything in my power to ensure that such a tragedy does not happen again,” National Police Chief Yoon Hee-kyun said. Yesterday already, when he began investigating local services on live TV. A week of national mourning has been declared in South Korea.