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.
Kim Geun-jin, a division commander for the Seoul police, said that little could be reported about the cause of the disaster as of 4 a.m. on Sunday because “identifying the victims is our top priority.” He added: “Our forensic teams are focused on identifying victims and collecting evidence from the site.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning, residents congregated at hospitals and makeshift mortuaries looking for their loved ones. Most of the killed were teenagers or in their 20s, Mr. Choi said. The dead included two foreigners, added Mr. Choi, who did not specify their nationalities.
At one ad hoc mortuary, at the Wonhyoro Multipurpose Indoor Gymnasium, just west of Itaewon, the bodies of 45 young people were arrayed on the floor beneath plastic sheets. Many still wore the costumes they had donned for a night of partying, one way distraught relatives would be able to identify them.
Kim Seo-jeong, 17, a high school student who dressed in a traditional Chinese qipao to go clubbing in the area, said that by 8 p.m. the alley near the Itaewon subway station was already too crowded to walk.
“We gave up an hour later and tried to turn around to go home but we could not move in the other direction either,” Ms. Kim said in a telephone interview. “There were people pushing from behind us. There were people in front of us pushing down the hill to go in the other direction.”
