The raids came a day after the agency acknowledged that Seoul police failed to act for hours despite receiving at least 11 emergency calls from pedestrians warning of an out-of-control crowd of Halloween revelers before the crash. Saturday in a narrow alley near the Hamilton Hotel. . The agency said members of its special investigation unit were retrieving documents from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Service and the Yongsan police station, district office, fire department and other offices. Local officials and police are facing questions about why they did not use crowd control measures or sufficient staff in the busy nightlife district, despite expecting a crowd of 100,000 after the easing of Covid restrictions. National police chief Yoon Hee-keun also acknowledged that his initial investigations found that officers failed to effectively handle calls alerting authorities to the potential danger of a crowd gathering in Itaewon. Yoon said the police had launched an internal investigation into the officers’ handling of emergency calls and other issues, including the on-site response to the crowd surge in Itaewon that night. His agency also released the transcripts of 11 calls made to the police’s 112 emergency hotline by pedestrians in Itaewon on Saturday, the first made at about 6.30pm, four hours before the crash near the Hamilton Hotel. The unidentified caller, who was near a shop in the alley where the crash happened, asked police to patrol the area because “too many people are going up and down and it’s very scary”. “People can’t get down, but (people) are also pushing up and I think (they) could be crushed to death,” the caller said. In the transcripts of the 11 calls, the callers used the Korean word for “crushed to death” 13 different times to express their concerns. South Korea’s interior minister and emergency office chief, Seoul’s mayor and the bureau chief of Yongsan ward, which governs Itaewon, have all issued public apologies. As of Wednesday, 156 people were confirmed dead and 157 were being treated for injuries after being trampled by the wave of crowds in a narrow alley that runs through the hotel and a dense row of storefronts.
