Seoul Halloween tragedy: Police admit crowd surge response was 'insufficient'

On Tuesday, South Korea's police chief said that officers had received multiple urgent reports of danger ahead of a deadly crowd crush at a Halloween event but their handling of them was "insufficient".

At least 156 (mostly) young people were killed, and scores more injured, in a deadly crowd surge late on Saturday at the first post-pandemic Halloween party in Seoul's popular Itaewon nightlife district.

An estimated 100,000 people had flocked to the area, but because it was not an "official" event with a designated organiser, neither the police nor local authorities were actively managing the crowd.

"There were multiple reports to the police indicating the seriousness at the site just before the accident occurred," National Police Chief Yoon Hee Keun said.

Police knew "a large crowd had gathered even before the accident occurred, urgently indicating the danger", he said, acknowledging the way this information was handled had been "insufficient".

On Tuesday, Seoul's interior minister became the first top official to make a clear apology to the public for the disaster, one of the worst ever in the country's history.

"I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere apologies to the public as the minister in charge of the people's safety for this accident," Lee Sang Min said, before bowing his head before lawmakers and cameras.

He promised to investigate what had caused the crowd crush and ensured that a disaster on this scale would never happen again.

South Korea is typically strong on crowd control, with protest rallies often so heavily policed that officers can outnumber participants.

However, on Saturday, the police deployed only 137 officers to Itaewon for Halloween, while 6,500 officers were present at a protest across town attended by about 25,000 people, local reports said.

On Tuesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said that the country needed to urgently improve its system for managing large crowds in the wake of the disaster.

"The safety of the people is important, whether or not there is an event organiser," he told a cabinet meeting.

He called for the country to develop "cutting-edge digital capabilities" to improve crowd management — but critics claim such tools already existed, and still were not deployed in Itaewon.

Seoul's City Hall has a real-time monitoring system that uses mobile phone data to predict crowd size, but it was not employed on Saturday night, local media reported.

Itaewon's district authorities also did not deploy any safety patrols, with officials saying the Halloween event was considered "a phenomenon" rather than "a festival", which would have required an official plan for crowd control.

"The question is, how did they manage with the limited number (of police) and what kind of measures did they take to make up for it?"