Seoul: South Korea on Sunday witnessed one of the worst disasters in years as in the capital city of Seoul hundreds of people died in a stampede. A mass of mostly young people was gathered in Seoul for the Halloween festival, but in a jiffy they got trapped and crushed as the crowd surged into a narrow alley, killing at least 151 people and injuring 82 others. According to the chief of the fire department, those killed or hurt were mostly teens and people in their 20s.
The tragic incident took place in a Seoul party spot--the Hamilton Hotel. However, it is not clear what led to the surge into the narrow downhill alley.
Fire officials and witnesses said people continued to pour into the alley after it was already packed wall-to-wall, when those at the top of the slope fell, sending people below them toppling over others.
Witnesses described scrambling to get out of the suffocating crowd in the downhill alley as people ended up piling on top of one another.
“People kept pushing down into a downhill club alley, resulting in other people screaming and falling down like dominos,” one unidentified witness was quoted as saying by the Yonhap news agency. “I thought I would be crushed to death too as people kept pushing without realizing there were people falling down at the start of the stampede.”