Finance
Officials confirmed one more death from the Halloween stampede in Seoul’s Itaewon district on Tuesday, bringing the total death toll from the tragedy to 156.
According to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters, a 20-year-old Korean woman died on Tuesday morning while being treated in critical condition.
According to officials, 29 people are still in critical condition, while 122 others have minor injuries, according to Yonhap News Agency.
101 of those killed were female, with 104 victims in their twenties and 31 victims in their thirties.
There were also 26 foreign victims, including five from Iran, four from China and four from Russia, two from the United States, two from Japan, and one each from France, Australia, Norway, Austria, Vietnam, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Sri Lanka.
On Saturday night, a massive crowd of Halloween revelers packed a narrow 3.2-metre-wide alley in Seoul’s entertainment district of Itaewon.
Some of them started to collapse, causing others to collapse like “dominoes” and pile up on top of one another.
It was the deadliest stampede in South Korean history, and the country’s worst disaster since 2014, when the ferry Sewol sank off the south coast, killing 304 people, mostly high school students.
The accident happened in a 40-meter-long downhill back alley that connects a busy restaurant district to a main street, where six adults can barely pass at the same time.
After the government lifted the outdoor mask-wearing mandate against the Covid-19 pandemic earlier this year, tens of thousands of people visited the area for Halloween festivities.
Meanwhile, the police have increased their investigation into the disaster, looking into testimonies from dozens of eyewitnesses as well as surveillance camera footage to reconstruct the events of the fatal incident.
According to Nam Gu-jun, chief of the National Office of Investigation, a 475-member special investigative team had interviewed 44 witnesses and obtained 52 pieces of surveillance camera footage in 42 locations around the scene as of Monday to determine the exact cause of the accident.
He also stated that social media videos were being investigated.
President Yoon Suk-yeol has declared a week-long period of mourning until Saturday, and mourning altars have been set up across the country to allow people to burn incense and pay their respects to those who were killed.
Source:OCN
