15 Crushed to Death and 'at Least 100 Injured' after Mass Panic

(News Today) - Fifteen people have been killed and at least 100 injured after mass panic broke out in a tunnel at Love Parade music festival in Duisburg, Germany. Witnesses described piles of bodies stacked on top of each other and revellers climbing walls to escape the crush.

Many were pinned shoulder to shoulder in the tunnel and unable to move. People standing on the motorway bridge above the scene could only watch helpless as at least 15 were crushed to death.

Revellers fought a desperate battle to to save the wounded. The scene in the city of Duisburg was so chaotic that it was difficult for rescue workers to reach the critically ill.

Of the dead, nine were women and six were men. Witnesses claimed the crush had been prompted by police attempts to restrict access to the area after it became overcrowded.

'It was hell,' Karl Lowenstein, 21, told the Daily Telegraph.'The tunnel was dark, it was full.

'Something happened - whether someone tripped or someone fell, I don't know

'But there was a stampede to get to the other end and those who fell... well, many of them never got up again.'

'There was no escape,' one Love Parade participant named Marius told the Bild.de website. 'People were pressed into the wall. I was afraid I'd die.'

One woman raver told Bild: 'I was lucky. I found a hole to escape through but two women were killed right next to me.'

Another man described trying to give one of the injured water to be told by a rescue worker 'don't bother with him, he's dead.'

One woman said getting through the tunnel as 'trying to pass through the eye of a needle.'

'The tunnel was too narrow to cope with the number of people taking the short-cut and should have been closed by crowd controllers before the parade even began,' she said.

People had been using the tunnel as a short-cut on the Love Parade, which consisted of 15 floats which set off at 2pm. Despite the scale of the tragedy unfolding at the entrance to a former freight rail station, the one-day techno festival continued as planned.

Organisers feared cancelling the event would only cause a second panic. Over 1.5 million revellers had gathered for the annual techno music festival in Duisburg, which is near Dusseldorf.

It had emerged that police had warned Love Parade organisers that there would be problems with crowd control if this year's event was held in the city centre.

Instead, the festival was moved a mile out of Duisburg to a less enclosed area.But the decision appears to have backfired. There were around 1,200 police on the ground to control the crowds.

Witnesses said the police seemed to be at a complete loss as to what to do.The emergency services are still on site, attending to the injured.

Police are still trying to determine exactly what happened, but the situation was 'very chaotic,' police commissioner Juergen Kieskemper said. He said police closed off the area where the parade was being held because it was already over-crowded.

They told revellers over loudspeakers to turn around and walk back in the direction they had come from before the panic broke out, he said. Meanwhile other revellers, still oblivious to the tragic events unfolding in another part of the parade, continue to party.

The Love Parade was once an institution in Berlin, but has been held in the industrial Ruhr region of western Germany since 2007. The original Berlin Love Parade grew from a 1989 peace demonstration into a huge outdoor celebration of club culture that drew about 1.5 million people at its peak in 1999.

But it suffered from financial problems and tensions with city officials in later years, and eventually moved.

Source : kompas

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