Live streams and videos from social media provide extra detail as to how a Halloween celebration turned disastrous in the South Korean capital.
Monday 31 October 2022 01:50, UKPacked into narrow alleyways lined with bars and clubs, thousands of people travelled to Itaewon, an area of Seoul, for the city's first Halloween festival since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The revellers turning up for the celebrations were predominantly young, with many travelling to the area via Itaewon train station. Over the following hours, the crowds grow in size. They funnel into a series of small side streets behind the main road around the Hamilton Hotel, highlighted in yellow on the map below. These streets are small and those running north to south slope steeply.At 10.06pm, people can be seen in the main alleyway running east to west still freely moving but slowly. Some people are holding each other to avoid being split up by the crowd as they pass an Irish bar in the background.
People in this street narrowly avoided disaster. It would be another steep alleyway on the other side of the Hamilton Hotel where the deadly crush would occur, highlighted in dark yellow below.This short video shows this alleyway west of the hotel earlier in the evening. The crowd is spread wall to wall across the narrow passageway - which sits on a 20% gradient - with no escape routes.Around the corner, Janelle Story, an eyewitness who spoke to Sky News, filmed her view as the crowd surged.
By 10.45pm it became clear something was very wrong. Livestreams from the main road show ambulances and emergency personnel heading towards the Hamilton Hotel. The video below shows the scene that the emergency services were heading from. A surge had forced the crowd to fall over, likely made worse by the steepness of the alleyway.