SEOUL —
South Korean police are seeking criminal charges, including involuntary manslaughter and negligence, against 23 officials — about half of them law enforcement officers — for a lack of safety measures blamed for a crowd surge that killed nearly 160 Halloween revelers in October.
Despite anticipating a weekend crowd of more than 100,000, Seoul police had assigned 137 officers to Itaewon, Seoul’s popular nightlife district, on the day of the crush. Those officers were focused on monitoring narcotics use and violent crimes, which experts say left few resources for pedestrian safety.
Son Je-han, who headed the National Police Agency’s special investigation into the incident, said Friday his team will now send the case to prosecutors. Those recommended for indictment include Park Hee-young, who is mayor of Seoul’s Yongsan district, and the district’s former police chief Lee Im-jae — two of six people who have been arrested in connection with the Oct. 28 disaster.
Lee has also been accused of falsifying a police report to disguise his late arrival to the scene. Two other police officials have been arrested over suspicions that they attempted to destroy computer files and other potential evidence tied to the accident.
The results of the 74-day police investigation announced by Son mostly confirmed what was already clear — that police and public officials in Yongsan failed to employ meaningful crowd-control measures for the expected numbers of Halloween revelers and essentially ignored pedestrian calls placed to police hotlines that warned of a swelling crowd hours before the surge turned deadly.
Officials also botched their response once people began getting toppled over and crushed in a narrow alley clogged with partygoers near the Hamilton Hotel around 10 p.m., failing to establish effective control of the scene and to allow rescue workers to reach the injured in time, Son said.
The authorities’ “inaccurate judgment of the situation, the slow distribution of information about the situation, poor cooperation between related institutions and delays in rescue operations were among the overlapping failures that caused the high number of casualties,” Son said at a news conference in Seoul.
Son said his team questioned nearly 540 people and collected 14,000 pieces of evidence from central and municipal government offices and transportation authorities. He said police investigators studied more than 180 video files recorded on security cameras or taken by journalists and pedestrians and jointly inspected the scene with forensic experts to analyze the density of the crowd.
Police said the crowd packing the corridor-like alley between the hotel and a dense row of storefronts grew into an unstoppable wave around 9 p.m., with people being unable to dictate their own movement once they got swept in. At around 10:15 p.m., people began falling and toppling on one another like dominoes, leading to the tragedy that resulted in 158 deaths and 196 injuries.