SEOUL: White mourning flowers and condolence gifts have been laid, and stores bearing condolence messages suspended business in Seoul’s Itaewon district Monday, as South Korea mourned the country’s deadliest crowd crush in the neighbourhood.
Mourning altars laden with white chrysanthemums also opened across the nation to allow people to burn incense and pay their respects to those killed in Saturday night’s crush that left at least 154 people, mostly in their 20s, killed and 33 others seriously injured.
President Yoon Suk Yeol was one of the first to pay tribute to the victims, Yonhap news agency reported.
Dressed in black, Yoon and first lady Kim Keon Hee visited an altar set up at Seoul Plaza in front of City Hall, laid flowers and bowed their heads in silent prayer.
Prime Minister Han Duck Soo and Seoul Mayor Oh Se Hoon also paid respects at the altar later.
The tragedy happened Saturday night when a massive crowd of Halloween partygoers packed a narrow 3.2-metre-wide alley in Seoul’s entertainment district of Itaewon. Some of them began to fall over, causing others to fall down like “dominoes” and pile up on one another.
It marked the deadliest crowd crush in South Korea’s history and the worst disaster the country has seen since 2014, when the ferry Sewol sank in waters off the south coast and killed 304 people, mostly high school students.
The 26 foreign victims include five from Iran, four each from China and Russia, two from the United States, two from Japan, and one each from France, Australia, Norway, Austria, Vietnam, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Sri Lanka, officials said.
Among those killed were one middle schooler and five high school students, all from Seoul, the education ministry said. Five other middle or high school students have been injured, and two of them were being treated at hospitals.
A total of 116 others sustained minor injuries.-Bernama
