On Halloween weekend last year, nearly 160 people were crushed to death in a narrow alleyway in South Korea's capital after the country's first post-pandemic holiday celebrations descended into deadly chaos.
One year on, despite an investigation and ongoing prosecutions of local officials, families of the victims -- who were overwhelmingly young women in their 20s and 30s -- say they are still searching for answers.Survivors describe being trapped in an impossibly dense crowd of people -- swept off their feet and suffocated by the pressure of bodies around them -- after tens of thousands of people poured into Seoul's Itaewon neighborhood on October 29, 2022 for Halloween celebrations.
District officials initially banned Halloween celebrations at Hongdae, another popular drink-and-party neighborhood, but quickly scrapped it after criticism that they should prepare for crowd control rather than banning the public from going out. Yu Hyoung-woo, who lost his daughter to the Itaewon crush, said none of the victims' families have received a formal briefing from the government.
But it stopped short of blaming any top government officials, and no senior figures were fired or resigned over the disaster, drawing strong protests from victims' families.
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