Police under fire for lax response to emergency calls hours before Itaewon crush
SEOUL. KAZINFORM A lax police response to emergency calls on the night of the Itaewon crowd crush came under growing scrutiny and criticism Wednesday following revelations that police snubbed a series of emergency calls about overcrowding in the neighborhood hours before the disaster, YONHAP reports.
The National Police Agency released Tuesday police documents chronicling those reports as the country delved into what went wrong and who is responsible for the deadly crush amid criticism that the accident could have been avoided or minimized if police had responded in a timely manner.
The tragedy happened Saturday night when a massive crowd of Halloween partygoers packed a narrow 3.2-meter-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 top of one another, leaving at least 156, mostly people in their 20s, killed.
Photo: en.yna.co.kr