Police received calls warning of crowd size hours before Itaewon tragedy

Social Affairs

Published: 02 Nov. 2022, 10:01

Police received calls warning of crowd size hours before Itaewon tragedy

Police and forensics teams walk out of the alleyway in Itaewon where most of the 156 casulaties were found on Sunday. [WOO SANG-JO]

A total of 11 calls warning of the dangerous size of the crowds in Itaewon were made to police prior to the crowd crush that took 156 lives on Saturday, according to transcripts released Tuesday.

The first call expressing concern about the size of the crowds in Itaewon was made at 6:34 p.m. Saturday, nearly four hours before the crowd crush, according to transcripts released by the National Police Agency.

A total of 11 calls were made to the 112 emergency number specifically mentioning the crowd size, with police only telling four of the callers that they would dispatch officers to the scene. The other seven callers were told that police would "follow-up" on the issue.

The transcripts, in which several callers directly mentioned the word for “crush” in Korean during the calls, were released after Yoon Hee-keun, commissioner general of the National Police Agency, admitted that there had been warnings of an impending tragedy and that police response may have been “insufficient.”

Transcript of the first call, made at 6:34 p.m. Saturday, in which the Korean word for ″crush″ is mentioned twice. ″Crush″ is bolded in red. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]