Every time Nuhyil Ahammed closes his eyes, his mind replays two horrific scenes he witnessed during the deadly Halloween crowd in Seoul. He is the man seen desperately performing CPR on his dead friend for 30 minutes. Another friend tried in vain to stop him, but he did not give up. Then there is the woman he saw in the crowd, drifting into a crowd of people, seemingly unable to breathe and staring helplessly at Ahmed. But there was nothing he could do to save her. “Those two things always come to my mind when I’m trying to sleep,” Ahammed, 32, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “[In the] in the last 48 hours, I’ve slept maybe five or six hours, at most.” Ahammed, an IT professional from India, was in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood on Saturday night when more than 150 people – most in their 20s and 30s – were killed. As the country begins a week of national mourning on Monday, the death toll rose to 154. Another 149 people were injured, 33 of them seriously. South Korean investigators are reviewing footage of the incident in hopes of providing insight into how the deadly crash unfolded — and whether it could have been prevented.
“Just ride the wave”
Ahammed has lived in Itaewon, a neighborhood known for its vibrant nightlife, for five years. And every year, he attends the Halloween celebrations in his neighborhood. But he has never seen anything like this before. This year marked Itaewon’s first Halloween celebration without masks or other COVID-19 measures since the start of the pandemic. About 100,000 showed up to the party, South Korean officials estimated. Ahammed and his friends were in an alley when it all started. Some people appeared to be trying to escape onto the main road, he said, while others were trying to do the opposite. “I was in the middle and people started pushing me from behind,” he said. “You can’t stop there. You can’t go back. All you have to do is just ride the wave.” Investigators inspect the scene of the fatal mass pregnancy. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters) Ahammed quickly became separated from his friends, he said. Somehow, he made his way to a wall and managed to grab a railing and pulled himself up some stairs above the crowd. He could see his friends below him, being pulled in different directions. He stayed there, he said, for 30 minutes, until he felt it was safe to get off and try to make his way home. The worst seemed to be over, but there were still panicked crowds in the streets. “When I’m walking around, I see people passing out, people screaming, yelling. They’re like, ‘I can’t breathe.’ They’re like, ‘Stop pushing, stop pulling,’” she said. In the chaos, he did not realize the extent of the tragedy. He heard murmurs of some falling, but had no idea that anyone had died. But soon, a grim picture began to emerge. He saw an ambulance arrive. Then another. And another one. First responders, he said, blocked traffic onto Main Street and began pulling people out into the street and performing CPR. They also started lining up corpses in the street, covering them with blankets. A fireman was walking around counting the dead. “That’s when I realized this is bad — very bad,” Ahammed said.
Experts say the tragedy was preventable
More than 80 percent of the dead were in their 20s or 30s, and 11 were teenagers, South Korea’s interior ministry said. Among the dead outside the country, five were from Iran, four from China, four from Russia, two from the United States, two from Japan and one each from Australia, Norway, France, Austria, Vietnam , Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka, according to the ministry. One Canadian was injured. The Sri Lankan victim, Ahammed said, was his friend. “The guy doesn’t drink or smoke. He just went on the road, you know, making a video call to show his wife what Korean life is like, you know, stuff like that,” he said. “After a while, he stopped answering the phone and then we knew he was dead.” People pay their respects near the Halloween crowd scene. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters) One thing Ahammed says he didn’t see much of was police officers. He spotted three or four total throughout the night. “I [saw] more police uniforms than actual police,” he said. Seoul police assigned 137 officers to handle Halloween revelers. Instead, nearly 7,000 police were sent elsewhere in the South Korean capital on Saturday to monitor the protest duels that drew tens of thousands of people, but fewer than the crowds in Itaewon, a police official told The Associated Press. The national government insisted there was no way to predict the crowd would get out of control, but several experts disagreed. Kong Ha-Song, a disaster prevention professor at South Korea’s Woosuk University, said more police and government officials should have been called in to monitor potential bottlenecks. He suggested that the crash might have been prevented if authorities had imposed one-way pedestrian lanes, barred entry to some narrow paths and temporarily closed Itaewon subway station to prevent too many people moving in the same direction. The deaths should be considered a “man-made disaster,” said Lee Changmu, a professor of urban planning at Seoul’s Hanyang University. Ahammed, meanwhile, says it’s difficult to point the finger. He says no one could have predicted this would happen in Korea, a country where large crowds are common but where he has always felt safe. “No one expected [this was] it will happen,” he said. “Normally when you go to a festival or something like that, you don’t see a lot of police. This is how Korea is safe.” With files from Reuters and the Associated Press. Interview with Nuhyil Ahammed produced by Chris Harbord.
