South Korea Halloween Stampede: 120 people Died in a Crowd Surge at a Halloween Event in Seoul

Officials they’re saying at least 120 people have died following a crowd surge at a Halloween festival in the capital city of Seoul. This has just been really breaking in the last hour or so the number has been increasing, it seems by the minute. The details are just devastating. Talk us through this.

This scale of the horror here is almost unimaginable as you said 120 people are confirmed dead another 100 are injured. Dozens of those injured are in the serious condition they are in hospital.

So it’s very possible that this death toll is going to rise in the coming hours. And, these are largely young people. This was a Halloween festival. These are people in their 20s largely looking at this incident.

So just an absolutely horrendous situation. Here’s what we know. South Korean media is reporting that about 100K people showed up for this Halloween festival in downtown Seoul.

Part of the reason this was so popular, it was the first outdoor Halloween party without masks in South Korea since the start of COVID. There COVID rules remain very strict over there.

This was a chance for young people to show up in costume without masks. And they flocked to this area, which has a lot of narrow alleyways. And what it looks like happens is people got caught up in the crush in one of those alleyways and as we’ve seen with stampedes all around the world, as soon as people get underfoot, it is almost impossible to get back up again.

And that is how we have reached a death toll just as astronomically high as we have here. The streets and the sidewalks are just covered with the bodies of the dead and the injured and there is this awful rhythmic pumping.

As you watch the arms of these First Aiders trying to administer CPR. South Korean media is reporting there are foreigners among the injured we don’t know their nationalities. We don’t know if there are Americans who got caught up in this.

But this is a downtown part of Seoul, which is popular not only with South Koreans but with ex-pats with tourists. And with US military personnel. There are 20,000 American servicemen and women stationed in South Korea. We will see over the coming hours if anybody was caught up in this.

Now, this incident happened at about 10:20 pm local time. It’s now 4 am. So about six hours ago, the Initial reports said something like 21 people were being treated for cardiac arrest.

But yes, it was clear this was a much, much bigger incident than that. And you started to be able to tell from the response from the South Korean authorities that this was a major incident. The South Korean president convened an emergency meeting with the mayor of Seoul, who’s in Europe right now and turning around to head back to his city.

Then we got that first report saying 59 people were killed and then just in the last hour or so, that death toll doubled to 120 which is where we’re at right now.