“I wish we could protect them,” she told AFP, speaking of the 154 people, mostly young women, killed in a crowd movement during what was to be a Saturday evening of celebrations. post-pandemic in Seoul’s cosmopolitan Itaewon district.
Instead, the party turned into a nightmare. In the narrow alley where tens of thousands of people crowded, eyewitnesses described scenes of horror, victims trapped and crushed to death, without any police presence or crowd control measures.
“I feel guilty. We let the young people down,” Ms. Song laments, wiping away her tears.
She is far from the only one crying in front of the huge altar erected in the center of Seoul, where the inhabitants, many of whom wear office suits, come to meditate during their lunch break after queuing in silence.
“I cried all night for the poor young people we lost. They were so young, in their prime,” said Park Sun-ja, 71, his eyes bulging behind his sunglasses. “It’s such a loss for our country!”
While the youngest of the victims were school-aged children, the majority of those who died were women in their twenties.
“The victims were young, I’m around the same age and I’m just devastated by what happened,” Hwang Gyu-hyeon, a 19-year-old student who is struggling to suppress her feelings, told AFP. tears.
– “Nothing was done” –
“I pray for the victims. I can’t believe this accident happened despite the signs that were clear in advance. Nothing was done to prepare for this crowd”, she criticizes .
The 154 victims, many of whom suffocated and died in the narrow alley despite desperate efforts by rescuers, included people from more than a dozen countries, from Australia to Vietnam to France, the United States United States, China and Japan.
The Japanese businesswoman Chi Naomi, 46, explains that the death of two of her compatriots made her feel the disaster.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s someone else’s tragedy,” she says. She says that in Japan, young people also celebrate Halloween but that the authorities are taking measures to control traffic and crowds in order to protect them.
“I wonder why there was no proper control in Itaewon that day,” she continued. “I’ve been to the site myself, and it’s such a small alley! There are a lot of things they could have done, like making the alley one-way or limiting the number of people there. I don’t understand why these measures were not taken”.
– Buddhist songs –
In the Itaewon district, a memorial has been improvised near the three-meter-wide alley where the disaster took place. Buddhist monks sing prayers and spread incense. Friends hug each other for comfort. The flowers, bottles of alcohol and other objects brought as offerings pile up to occupy a large part of the sidewalk.
“We were there, but we left before it got too crazy, because it was too much,” said Robyn Lindsay, a British tourist, of the Halloween party on Saturday night.
It was only the start of the evening, but she and her friend had already felt “a little crushed” by the crowd and retreated, she continued, adding that she now realizes they were ” very very lucky.”
“We are just thinking of all the victims and their families,” she told AFP, wiping away her tears in front of the memorial.
At a third memorial in Noksapyeong, near the new government offices in Seoul, a group of families affected by the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014 (304 dead, mostly schoolchildren) came to pay their respects, along with a group of police. Many are visibly moved as they lay white flowers on the altar.
Criticism mounted in the media and on the internet about failings in policing and crowd control at the Halloween party, when only 137 police officers were deployed to an estimated crowd of 100,000.
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