SEOUL — A raucous Halloween celebration in the swinging center of the South Korean capital morphed on Saturday night into a grim procession of bodies after at least 151 people were killed in the crush of a crowd stuck in a narrow roadway, officials said.
Dozens more were injured, many of them seriously, according to a fire department spokesman.
As many as 100,000 people were celebrating Halloween in Itaewon, an area of central Seoul popular for its nightlife. The holiday had long been a neighborhood favorite before being interrupted by coronavirus restrictions imposed on the city two years ago, and young people flocked to parties on Saturday night.
By Sunday morning, costume-clad partygoers had fled a scene strewn with the bodies of young revelers as chaos and confusion reigned. At news conferences, officials said they had no clear idea of what caused the crush, or how the annual festival had devolved so quickly into the country’s worst peacetime tragedy since 2014.
As images of lifeless bodies piled atop each other and queues of emergency workers pushing gurneys loaded with the dead circulated across social media, Koreans demanded answers and accountability.
