Scant security for Halloween raises questions in South Korea – Times of India

NEW YORK: As the grim task of identifying the dead in Saturday night’s tragic crowd surge in South Korea’s capital neared completion, focus turned to questions of just how the Halloween celebration had turned so deadly. South Korean police are usually so good at crowd control that the country’s protest rallies often look like choreographed events. Leaders bark from loudspeakers mounted on trucks. Crowds of tens of thousands march down roads chanting protest slogans and even pick up trash behind themselves. Police officers walk alongside, guiding the throngs and carefully diverting traffic. What happened in Itaewon, where a Halloween crowd crush killed more than 150 people on Saturday evening, showed crowd control gone awry.

This year, the police said they were unprepared, partly because their forces had been diverted earlier on Saturday to nearby districts where anti-government and other protest rallies were being held, officials said. “The crowd this year was not worrisomely bigger. . . but our police forces were scattered to various protests across the city,” home minister, Lee Sangmin, told reporters on Sunday.
At least 141 of the 153 people killed in the disaster had been identified by Sunday afternoon, officials said. At a community center where family members had been awaiting news, wrenching wails punctured the somber wait as the dreaded confirmations arrived, one by one. Ninety-seven of the dead were women and 56 were men. More than 80% of the dead are in their 20s and 30s, but at least four were teenagers.
Witnesses said they saw almost no crowd control andscant police presence in the hours leading up to the tragedy. A 17-year-old survivor said people “fell like dominoes” after a group of young men made a hard shove down a narrow hill that had been filled with a nearlystandstill crowd for hours. Another witness described a “sea of bodies” rushing toward her, in what she later realised was in panic after the tragedy began to unfold. “I still can’t believe what has happened. It waslike a hell,” said Kim Mi Sung, an official at a nonprofit organization that promotes tourism in Itaewon. Kim said she performed CPR on 10 people who were unconscious and 9 of them were declared dead on the spot.