Declared by South Korean authorities as a special disaster zone, Itaewon was closed to the public on Monday, October 31. The televisions, however, broadcast images of the alley in the festive district of Seoul, where 154 young people, including 26 foreigners, died, suffocated and trampled in a crowd movement during the Halloween celebrations, in the heart of the night from 29 to 30 october. Still strewn with pieces of red fabric, multicolored bags and a pumpkin with a macabre smile, the sloping alley barely 4 meters wide, usually teeming, is nothing but silence.
In Itaewon, as in the rest of South Korea, it is time for meditation. All the festivities and other concerts planned in the country have been canceled. Conservative President Yoon Seok-youl, who has declared national mourning until November 5, went on Monday with his wife, Kim Keon-hee, to the altar in front of the city hall of the city. South Korean capital. The couple laid flowers and observed a moment of silence. The leader has canceled all his commitments to focus on the aftermath of what the South Korean press is already calling the “Halloween nightmare”.
A nightmare described on social networks or in the press by the survivors: “People were screaming for their lives, but no one could move. » “I thought I was going to die. My whole body was stuck among all the others, while people laughed from a terrace and filmed us. » An Itaewon bar worker told Yonhap News how he helped firefighters carry a “fifty bodies”and expressed his gratitude for having “could free a living person trapped under several corpses”.
The nightmare is also that of the relatives of the victims, some of whom have faced terrible difficulties to find out the fate of their child. A father, also quoted in local media, said he wandered for a long time in the hospitals where the injured had been transferred, including the Soonchunhyang University Hospital in Seoul, in search of his daughter, of whom he had no news. He eventually learned that his body was resting in a hospital in Gyeonggi Province, neighboring Seoul.
Youth party
Mourning is accompanied by controversy, particularly over the dissemination of images and videos of deceased persons, “what should be prohibited”underlines in its October 31 editorial the conservative daily JoongAng. Nam Young-hee, an official of the opposition Democratic Party, is criticized for blaming the disaster in a Facebook post for Yoon Suk-yeol’s transfer of the South Korean presidency to the district in July. Yongsan, which would have the effect of mobilizing significant police resources. She later removed her post.
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