At least 151 people have been confirmed dead after a huge crowd celebrating Halloween surged into an alley in a nightlife area of the South Korean capital Seoul on Saturday night.
According to emergency officials, the victims were mostly teenagers and young adults in their twenties.
Further, information confirmed that sixty-five people were injured, nineteen in critical condition in the melee in Seoul’s Itaewon district.
Social media footage showed hundreds of people packed in the narrow, sloped alley crushed and immobile as emergency officials and police tried to pull them free.
Choi, the Yongsan district fire chief, said all the deaths were likely from the crush.
It was the first Halloween event in Seoul in three years after the country lifted COVID restrictions and social distancing.
“A number of people fell during a Halloween festival, and we have a large number of casualties,”
Many of those killed, women in their twenties, were near a nightclub.” Choi said.
President Yoon Suk-yeol presided over an emergency meeting with senior aides and ordered a task force be set up to secure resources to treat the injured and to launch a thorough investigation into the cause of the disaster.
The disaster is among the country’s deadliest since a 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304 people, mainly high school students.
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