Tag: Itaewon

The Korean left continues to try and pressure President Yoon to fire the Interior Minister over the Itaewon crowd crush disaster:

 The opposition-controlled National Assembly on Sunday passed a motion calling for the dismissal of Interior Minister Lee Sang-min over the bungled government response to the deadly Itaewon crowd crush.

The motion won backing from 182 of the 183 lawmakers who cast ballots, with one vote declared invalid.

Members of the ruling People Power Party (PPP), which has opposed the dismissal motion, boycotted the vote and walked out of the chamber en masse before voting began.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but according to the article President Yoon will likely ignore the opposition party’s demands. This is clearly politically motivated to try and put blame on the Yoon administration for the Itaewon tragedy when any fair minded person realizes that this was a failure of crowd control at the local police level.

This poll seems pretty biased when people who face losing their jobs are being surveyed:

More than 83 percent of unionized civil servants support punishing and sacking Interior Minister Lee Sang-min for the bungled emergency response to the deadly crowd crush in Seoul’s neighborhood, their union said Monday.

The results came in a poll conducted among members of the Korean Government Employees’ Union from Tuesday through Thursday, asking civil servants to rate the Yoon Suk-yeol government’s policies in a seven-point questionnaire. About 38,000 of the union’s 120,000 took part in the survey.

Of those who responded, 83.4 percent said the interior minister should be fired and punished as one responsible for the deadly crowd crush on Oct. 29, the union said.

Nearly 93 percent opposed the government’s workforce downsizing plan, while its push to privatize some public service sectors drew objections from 87.9 percent. Almost 90 percent objected to the government pushes to expand work hours and have differentiated minimum wages for different business sectors.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but it is in my opinion nothing more than virtue signaling to fire the Interior Minister for failed crowd control measures. So every time there is a festival, concert, etc. in Korea in the future, the Interior Minister has to show up and direct crowd control to avoid be held responsible for it going wrong?

Even more police officers and other officials are being charged for not doing their jobs properly the night of the Itaewon crowd crush disaster:

A total of nine police officers and government officials were additionally booked Wednesday for an investigation into the bungled response to the crowd crush in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood, police said.

Among those on the list are Park Sung-min, a superintendent general, and Song Byung-joo, a former emergency monitoring officer at Yongsan Police Station, as well as four other intelligence officers, they said. 

Park is under suspicion of ordering the deletion of an internal intelligence report giving prior warnings of a possible safety accident during the Halloween period in a suspected attempt to cover up inaction. A superintendent general is the fourth-highest rank in the police.

Also on Wednesday, Song, who was in charge of the police’s 112 emergency hotline in Yongsan Ward covering the Itaewon district, was quizzed by a special investigation team earlier in the day on whether he had promptly reported the situation to Lee Im-jae, who formerly headed the station.

Lee earlier testified during a parliamentary audit that he learned of the accident at around 11 p.m., around 45 minutes after the incident first erupted, claiming the emergency hotline chief had earlier reported to him that nothing unusual was going on.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

A USFK servicemember and his wife described recently to the Stars & Stripes what it was like to be in the middle of the Itaewon crowd crush disaster:

“Everybody acts like we were supposed to know that this was happening,” Riley Watts said. “Nobody knew.”

‘Like being in water’

As the crowd grew and space on the sidewalk became scarce, the Wattses were surrounded by people who were unintentionally “pushing really hard,” the couple said.

The force of so many people together “would pick me up without me even trying to move,” Riley Watts said, and his feet left the ground.

“It was kind of like being in water; it was just pushing us down the road,” he said.

Amid panicked screams in the crowd, Riley Watts saw a girl fall, he said.

“I reached down to get her and she put her hand in mine, but when I tried to pull her up, she wouldn’t budge,” he said. “And she was on the ground and when the crowd surged, it pushed her down away from me and pushed me away from her.”

Riley said he does not know what became of the girl.

“People were screaming at me, ‘Stop pushing me; I can’t breathe,’” he said. “And I was telling them, ‘It’s not me; I’m not doing it.’”

The couple soon realized that hunting for open space in the crowd was a dangerous task, according to Allyson Watts. As soon as open space materialized, people rushed so quickly into it that it became a “stumbling risk,” she said.

“If there was a sudden opening … then you risked falling over,” she said.

The Wattses eventually got off the sidewalk and onto the street because “it was the only place that was clear,” Allyson added.

“I would rather be in front of a car at that point rather than what we were up against,” Riley Watts said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but I am still waiting for someone to figure out who started the reported pushing at the top of the slope that caused the disaster to happen.

The fact that the pro-North Korea Minbun group is involved shows how these lawyers plan to use the Itaewon crush tragedy to politically attack the Yoon administration:

The bereaved families of some Itaewon crowd crush victims held a news conference Tuesday, calling for the punishment of those responsible for the tragic accident.

The conference was organized in southern Seoul by Minbyun-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, an organization of progressive lawyers, which it says legally represents the families of 34 of 158 people killed during and after Halloween celebrations in Seoul’s Itaewon district on Oct. 29.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Minbyun for those that don’t remember has been used to legally attack North Korean defectors, one of the groups behind the US beef riots, and have long attacked the USFK relocation plan. They have recently been calling for the signing of a peace treaty to end the Korean War so US troops can be withdrawn:

The Washington Post has an article published that takes a very detailed look at the Itaewon crowd crush disaster:

For nearly four hours before people started dying during a Halloween celebration in Seoul’s Itaewon district, partygoers pleaded with police to divert the crowds that were packing World Food Street and pushing into a 16-foot-wide alley — a tight, sloping space where most of 158 lives would be lost in a gruesome crush.

And once that crush began, it took at least 26 minutes for emergency personnel to start effectively evacuating people. Some victims were trapped for more than an hour before rescuers reached them. The delays proved catastrophic.

A Washington Post analysis of more than 350 videos and photos, some obtained exclusively and many reviewed by experts at The Post’s request, found that multiple critical factors contributed to the tragedy and death toll in Itaewon on the night of Oct. 29.

Washington Post

You can read more at the link, but really I only learned two new things from the article. First is that 119 calls were being placed about people being injured due to overcrowding in the alley almost four hours before people died. There was police officers there trying to redirect the crowd before the crush happened. However, there was not enough of them to stop more people from entering the alley.

What the article does not answer is who was the group reports claimed was pushing people on top of the slope? Was there really a Korean celebrity sighting that triggered the pushing? Hopefully someone figures that out because the alley was over capacity for almost four hours before the pushing caused it to turn tragic.

It is pretty clear that the political opposition wants to form this committee so they can come up with findings to blame the Yoon administration for the crowd crush tragedy in Itaewon:

The main opposition Democratic Party (DP) and two minor progressive parties submitted a joint request Wednesday for a parliamentary investigation into the Itaewon crowd crush despite opposition from the ruling party.

The DP, the Justice Party (JP) and the Basic Income Party submitted the request to the National Assembly’s Bills Division on Wednesday afternoon, with an aim to have the request reported at a parliamentary plenary session scheduled for Thursday.

“We should clearly determine where the responsibility lies and come up with measures to prevent a recurrence by looking thoroughly into the accident, including its cause and measures taken before or after the tragedy,” the parties said in the request sponsored by 181 lawmakers.

The parties called for forming an 18-member special committee to oversee the probe and look into whether measures by government agencies were appropriate and whether there were attempts to minimize or cover up the tragedy.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but prosecutors already have an investigation going on that has led to a number of arrests and firings already.

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.