The head of state and his wife each laid a white flower in front of the huge black altar erected in the center of Seoul in tribute to the victims of the disaster on Saturday evening. The public was then allowed to march in front of the monument to pay their respects, some in tears.
In the Itaewon district, where the fatal crowd movement occurred, passers-by stopped to pray and lay flowers and bottles of alcohol as offerings in front of another memorial, improvised in front of a metro station.
On the internet and in the press, criticism was fired against the authorities on Monday and information about potential lack of police preparation on the evening of the tragedy began to circulate.
About 100,000 people, mostly in their twenties, dressed up for Halloween, had converged on Saturday on Itaewon, a district of bars and nightclubs made up of a maze of narrow, steeply sloping alleys along a main avenue. Witnesses described a total absence of measures aimed at channeling or controlling this huge crowd.
Police acknowledged on Monday that they only deployed 137 officers to Itaewon on Saturday evening, while stressing that this figure was higher than those for Halloween parties in previous years. Local media pointed out that most of these police were there to prevent drug use, not to channel the crowd of revelers.
“It’s a disaster that could have been controlled or prevented,” Lee Young-ju, a professor from Seoul University’s fire and disaster department, told YTN. “But nobody cared about it, and above all nobody took responsibility,” he lamented.
– The police criticized –
On social media, many users accused the police of completely failing to control the crowd, leaving too many people to gather around Itaewon subway station and in the alleys where the deadly stampede took place.
“I’ve lived in Itaewon for ten years and have seen Halloween parties every year, but yesterday’s one drew way more people than the previous ones,” Twitter user @isakchoi312 said, also pointing to the absence of any control measures.
The South Korean government has denied any laxity. The stampede “was not a problem that could have been solved by deploying police or firefighters in advance,” Interior Minister Lee Sang-min said at a press briefing on Sunday.
The South Korean police are however masters in crowd control, in a country where the numerous and frequent demonstrations are often supervised by a number of agents greater than that of the participants. But the organizers of political or union demonstrations are required to declare their plans to the authorities in advance, which was not the case for the young people who came to participate in large numbers in the Halloween party in Itaewon.
Witnesses described scenes of chaos and horror in the sloping alley just three meters wide, where thousands of revelers began pushing each other, falling on top of each other, choking and panicking , without any police presence.
The disaster left 154 dead, including 26 foreigners, according to the latest official report which could still increase, with at least 33 injured people in critical condition.
South Korea has entered a week of national mourning. Many concerts and other festive events were canceled, and flags were lowered across the country.
