Category: Seoul

It is pretty clear that the messaging from the investigation into the Itaewon Crushing Disaster is that local officials are the ones the blame for the tragedy:

A special investigation team raided the office of the national police chief and dozens of other offices Tuesday as part of an investigation into the deadly Itaewon crowd crush that killed at least 156 people.

A total of 55 offices were raided, including the offices of National Police Agency Commissioner General Yoon Hee-keun and Kim Kwang-ho, the chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA), according to officials. 

Other locations include offices of senior SMPA intelligence and situation monitoring officers, the Yongsan Police Station, Yongsan Ward office chief Park Hee-young, the Seoul Metropolitan Fire & Disaster Headquarters and the Yongsan Fire Station.

Yonhap

The now fired Yongsan Police Chief Lee Im-Jae is getting absolutely crushed in the media for his slow response to the tragedy:

An independent team of investigators announced that Lee had belatedly arrived at the police substation after he had insisted on moving by his car despite a heavy traffic jam around the Itaewon area at the time.

After leaving a restaurant where he had been having dinner with officers from his office, Lee had arrived at Noksapyeong Station at around 10 p.m. The station is located just 10 minutes by foot from the scene.

However, Lee’s car detoured from the subway station to find other ways, and he was only able to arrive at a street near the police substation around between 10:55 p.m. and 11:01 p.m.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I saw on the Korean news video footage from the restaurant of Lee eating with other officers. It can be seen that he is getting calls which were supposedly warnings of dangerous crowds that needed to be responded to in Itaewon. Lee said he would respond after he and the other officers finished eating. Instead of walking to the scene and arriving in time to help he insisted on being driven. Driving to the scene made him arrive nearly an hour later than if he would have walked thus arriving too late to prevent the first deaths.

It looks like personnel who will take the fall for the bungled police response to the Itaewon Crushing Disaster have been identified:

 The now-suspended police chief in the district of Yongsan has been booked for an investigation, along with the head of the Yongsan Ward office and two others, on charges of professional negligence resulting in death in connection with the deadly Itaewon crowd crush, officials said Monday. 

Police and fire authorities, and the Yongsan Ward office have been under fire following revelations that there had been warning signs before the deadly accident, but they did little to prevent it or to respond in a timely manner.

The investigation team said the four officials booked for a formal investigation are Lee Im-jae, who was relieved of duty as Yongsan Police Station chief following the crush; Yongsan Ward office chief Park Hee-young; senior emergency monitoring officer Ryu Mi-jin, who was in charge at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency on the day of the accident; and chief of the Yongsan Fire Station Choi Seong-beom.

Police documents and investigation results have shown that about a dozen emergency calls came in warning of a dangerous level of overcrowding in Itaewon in the few hours leading up to the Oct. 29 crush that killed 156 Halloween partygoers, mostly people in their 20s.

The investigation team said a charge of negligence of duty has been additionally applied to Lee for allegedly having arrived at the accident site too late and belatedly informing the top police command of the emergency situation.

Choi, meanwhile, has been suspected of failing to promptly communicate with police and respond to the emergency, while Park has been accused of neglecting her duties to come up with sufficient crowd control planning and accident prevention measures for the big Halloween gatherings.

Ryu, meanwhile, has been accused of having been absent from her seat at the situation monitoring room on the night of the deadly crowd crush.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the blame is definitely being spread around to the police, government officials, and the fire department.

This response seems extremely slow considering there is a police station not very far from Itaewon Station:

A police squad first arrived at the scene of the Halloween crowd crush in Seoul nearly 85 minutes after the incident erupted, police data showed Sunday.

A total of five police squads affiliated with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA) were mobilized on the day of the crowd crush in Seoul’s Itaewon district that killed at least 156 people, mostly those in their 20s, according to the data submitted by the SMPA to Rep. Lee Tae-won of the main opposition Democratic Party.

The No. 11 police squad first arrived at the scene at 11:40 p.m. on Oct. 29 under the instruction of Lee Im-Jae, a former chief of the Yongsan Police Station that includes the Itaewon neighborhood. The first call to the police’s 112 emergency hotline was made around 10:15 p.m.

Four other squads arrived at the scene one by one, starting from 11:50 p.m. on Oct. 29 to 1:14 a.m. on Oct. 30, according to the SMPA data.

Lee — temporarily suspended from his post — was also found to have arrived at the Itaewon police substation at 11:05 p.m., some 50 minutes after the crush happened.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

People are eager to blame someone for the Itaewon crowd crush disaster and the Korean police have become the main target:

According to police, 137 police officers were deployed in Itaewon on Saturday night. When asked whether there was enough police presence, Yoon Hee-keun, new head of the National Police Agency, said on Monday it was “difficult” to give a definite answer.

Multiple eyewitness accounts say there was little police presence to control the crowd. Viral clips on social media show people struggling to move quickly.

In a briefing on Sunday, Lee Sang min, Minister of Interior and Safety, said he understood that deploying police officers or firefighters in advance could not have “solved the problem.”

But Professor Choi Don-mook at the department of fire engineering at Gachon University told The Korea Herald there were several ways to respond to a growing crowd.

“When there are this many people, traffic must be closed off. Even if the turnout grew unexpectedly, (the authorities) could have checked CCTVs or even use drones and introduce one way traffic if necessary,” he said.

Minister Lee’s remark has also been criticized by the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, better known as Minbyun, as potentially downplaying the government’s safety management responsibility.

In a viral TikTok, Nathan Taverniti, an Australian survivor who survived the deadly crowd crush, said there was a “lack of planning police force and emergency services.”

“You know how many people were going to that event. Why were you not prepared?” he said in the clip.

Steven Belsi, the father of an American student who died in the crowd crash, told NBC News that the South Korean police should have been better prepared.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but in my opinion the simple thing that could have prevented what happened was to shutdown the Itaewon subway station. The tragedy happened just across the street from the train station. People were undoubtedly moving to and from the clubs and the train station using the narrow alley where the tragedy occurred. Closing Itaewon station may have caused less overcrowding in that area if people had to walk further to get into Itaewon from other stations.

With that all said if people really want to find who is to blame, then determine who started the initial pushing at the top of the slope that caused people to fall on top of each other in the alley.

The misinformation going around that the Yongsan police department was short handed due to providing presidential security quickly spread around the Internet after the Itaewon stampede tragedy. Now the police are trying to play catch up to get the truth out that they actually had more officers in Itaewon than past Halloween celebrations:

Halloween festivities in Itaewon have no official organizers. South Korean police said Monday they don’t have any specific procedures for handling incidents such as crowd surges during an event that has no organizers. 

Police said they dispatched 137 officers to maintain order during Halloween festivities on Saturday, much more than the 34-90 officers mobilized in 2017, 2018 and 2019 before the pandemic.

Citing those figures, police dismissed as “different from the truth” speculation that a police station in the area was understaffed because it was providing extra security for Yoon, who earlier moved the presidential office to a site near Itaewon. They said police-provided security for presidents has long been handled by two special police units which have nothing to do with the Yongsan police station, whose jurisdiction includes Itaewon.

ABC News

You can read more at the link, but the misinformation being put out was clearly an attempt to politicize the tragedy and blame it on President Yoon. If it got traction then it could help set up Yoon for impeachment much like what happened to former President Park Geun-hye who got blamed for the Sewol disaster during her presidency.

The death toll could go even higher with many more people still in the hospital in critical condition:

As of Sunday evening, officials put the death toll at 153 and the number of injured people at 133. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety said the death count could further rise as 37 of the injured people were in serious conditions.

Ken Fallas, a Costa Rican architect who went Itaewon with expat friends, used his smartphone to film video showing unconscious people being carried out from the alley as others shouted for help. He said the loud music made things more chaotic.

“When we just started to move forward, there was no way to go back,” Fallas said. “We didn’t hear anything because the music was really loud. Now, I think that was one of the main things that made this so complicated.”

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. At least 20 of the dead are foreigners from China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere. Two of the dead are U.S. citizens, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul confirmed in a statement Sunday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but no word yet if the two Americans were USFK service members or not. This report says that USFK has not reports of any casualties though they are still accounting for personnel. Once again condolences to all the friends and families impacted by this tragic disaster.

This is absolutely horrible what happened last night in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul:

At least 146 people died and more than 150 were injured in a crowd crush in Itaewon, Yongsan-gu, central Seoul, according to fire authorities at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday. The fire department began to receive reports of patients having difficulty breathing at 10:22 p.m. on Saturday.

Of the 146 people who died, 101 were transferred to the hospital. The remaining 45 bodies were kept on site and later moved to a nearby multi-purpose indoor gymnasium. Identifying the deceased is expected to take some time, according to fire officials. Most of the dead were in their 20s. Officials expect that the number of casualties will continue to rise throughout the day.

Choi Eul-cheon, head of the Yongsan Police’s criminal division, said, “No drug-related reports have been confirmed” in response to a question about whether drugs were involved in the incident.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but rumors being spread was that it was caused by reports that candy filled with drugs was being handed out to people and that a celebrity was at a bar that caused a large amount of people to surge into the alley next to the Hamilton Hotel. There was obviously something going on in that alley to cause so many people to surge into that direction at once. I am sure in the coming days we will find out what happened. Odds are there was plenty of USFK servicemembers at Itaewon last night. No word yet of any of the casualties were US military personnel.

On Twitter there is a lot of videos showing what happened during the stampede and the aftermath. Looking at the videos it appears that most of the victims are young women, which would make sense that they would be crushed in a crowd more easily than larger males. Warning the videos below the fold are graphic.