“Before the accident, there were so many people pushing each other… I too got caught up in the crowd. At first I couldn’t pull myself free either. I felt an accident was about to happen“, continues Jeon Ga-eul, present during the drama. “A short person like me couldn’t even breathe”, an eyewitness told Yonhap News, adding that she survived because she was on one side of the alley. “The people in the middle suffered the most“, she said. Another witness described on Twitter the panic that began when people “kept pushing down” in the sloping and already crowded alley.
Some witnesses said stores in the neighborhood blocked people from entering to escape the deadly mob. “It seems that the casualties were more numerous as people tried to take refuge in nearby shops, but were sent back to the streets because the opening hours had ended“, said a survivor in Yonhap. Faced with the large number of victims, the firefighters who arrived on the scene asked passers-by to help them perform cardiac massage on the injured on the sidewalk, amid the debris. The bodies of the people crushed or trampled dead were lined up on the ground, under blankets or other improvised shrouds.
Of the 153 people who did not survive the crowd movement, several nationalities are to be deplored. Many Koreans are part of it, foreigners as well. The Quai d’Orsay told BFM TV that a Frenchman was to be deplored among the deaths, two others, injured, went out of business after being taken to hospital. Never has Halloween been so deadly…