People place flowers at memorial wall in Seoul on anniversary of Halloween stampede

The narrow streets and steep alleyways in Seoul’s nightlife district of Itaewon were unusually quiet on Saturday evening but South Korean police were taking no chances as they rolled out black and yellow crash barriers. They were designed to ensure that pedestrians could only walk up the street on one side and down along the other, an attempt to prevent a repeat of last Halloween’s stampede that saw 159 young people crushed to death.

At the bottom of the short, narrow alley where the disaster happened people lay flowers at a memorial wall with handwritten messages commemorating those who died. A few kilometres away at Seoul Plaza thousands attended a memorial service on Sunday night, the anniversary of the tragedy, calling for a thorough investigation and an apology from the authorities.

“We believe that even though our children are gone the exact truth must be revealed. We need to know why the tragedy happened and why it wasn’t prevented,” Il-suk Oh, whose 25 year-old daughter Ji-min died in the crush, told The Irish Times.

“She was truly beautiful and had a strong sense of independence. She worked at a hospital, saved her salary, and got her own apartment so she could live independently. That day she went shopping with her mother, bought new clothes and shoes, and met her friend in the evening. She planned to spend the night at her friend’s place but they decided to go to Itaewon for dinner.”

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Halloween weekend had drawn bigger crowds to Itaewon each year since 2017, and it was no surprise that last year’s celebration, the first since all coronavirus restrictions were dropped, would attract the biggest yet. Emergency services received calls three hours before the stampede warning that the crowds, estimated at around 100,000, were becoming dangerously big.

The crush began shortly after 10pm, and within minutes hundreds of people were piled on top of one another in five or six layers. Emergency workers struggled to drag people out for first aid and resuscitation, before the dead and injured were placed in 40 hospitals across the city.

“The government has not disclosed any information about the rescue operations, where the victims were taken, and how long they survived. Official government autopsy reports indicate a specific time of death, yet some individuals had their smartwatches recording their heartbeats at that very moment. Some even woke up due to the cold and were found lying next to the deceased,” Mr Oh said.

Sun-mi Choi’s daughter Ga-young, a 21 year-old fashion design student, had dinner with friends and visited an art exhibition before going to Itaewon for a Halloween party. After the crush Ga-young’s friend went with her in the ambulance to hospital.

“She provided all of Ga-young’s details to the paramedics and even gave her mother’s contact information. However, once they arrived at the funeral home Ga-young was declared a ‘Jane Doe’, an unidentified body,” Ms Choi said.

After an official investigation into the disaster only lower-level officials were prosecuted and the victims’ families say they still do not know the actual cause of the crush. They want legislation to guarantee the rights of disaster victims and to require the government to conduct thorough fact-finding investigations.

“We need our children’s honour restored, the prevention of such incidents in the future, the safety of the remaining children in this country, and an end to the government’s victim-blaming. Halloween was a part of our everyday life, a day when both traders and visitors had their routines. But the government considers it a problem with Halloween and the people who gathered there. The victims are being held responsible for their own deaths,” said Ms Choi.