SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA (AP) – South Korea’s police chief admitted “a heavy responsibility” for failing to prevent a recent crowd surge that killed more than 150 people during Halloween festivities in Seoul, saying yesterday that officers didn’t effectively handle earlier emergency calls about the impending disaster.
The admission came as the South Korean government faces growing public scrutiny over whether the crowd surge on Saturday night in Seoul’s Itaewon district, a popular nightlife neighbourhood, could have been prevented and who should take the responsibility for the country’s worst disaster in years.
“I feel a heavy responsibility (for the disaster) as the head of one of related government offices,” commissioner general of the Korean National Police Agency Yoon Hee-keun told a televised news conference.
“Police will do their best to prevent a tragedy like this from happening again.”
Yoon said an initial investigation has found that there were many urgent calls by citizens notifying authorities about the potential danger of a crowd gathering in Itaewon, but officers who had received those calls didn’t respond to them in a satisfactory manner.
Yoon said police have subsequently launched an intense internal probe to look deeper into the officers’ handling of the emergency calls and other issues like their on-the-spot response to the crowd surge in Itaewon at that night.
The disaster – which left at least 156 people dead and 151 others injured – was concentrated in a downhill, narrow alley in Itaewon. Witnesses described people falling on one another, suffering severe breathing difficulties and falling unconscious.
They also recalled rescuers and ambulances failed to reach the crammed alleys in time because the entire Itaewon area was extremely packed with slow-moving vehicles and a crowd of partygoers clad in Halloween costumes.
During a Cabinet council meeting yesterday, President Yoon Suk-yeol also acknowledged that South Korea lacks research on a crowd management. He called for using drones and other high-tech resources to develop an effective crowd control capability. He said the government will soon hold a meeting with experts to review overall national safety rules.
The crowd surge is South Korea’s deadliest disaster since the 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304 people and exposed the country’s lax safety rules and regulatory failures.
Saturday’s crowd surge has subsequently raised public questions about what South Korea has done to prevent human-made disasters.
After the Itaewon disaster, police launched a 475-member task force to find its cause.
