Seoul crowd surge survivor can’t stop replaying scenes from deadly Halloween celebrations

Every time Nuhyil Ahammed closes his eyes, his mind replays two horrific scenes he witnessed during Seoul’s deadly Halloween crowd surge. 

There’s the man he saw desperately performing CPR on his dead friend for 30 minutes. Another friend tried in vain to stop him, but he wouldn’t give up. 

Then there’s the woman he saw in the crowd, swept up in a throng of people, seemingly unable to breathe and staring helplessly at Ahammed. But he could do nothing to save her.

“These two things always come into my mind when I try to sleep,” Ahammed, 32, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “[In the] last 48 hours, I slept maybe five or six hours, maximum.”

Ahammed, an IT professional from India, was in Seoul’s Itaewon neighbourhood on Saturday night when more than 150 people — most of them in their 20s and 30s — were killed.

As the country begins a week of national mourning on Monday, the death toll climbed to 154. Another 149 people were injured, 33 of them in serious condition. 

South Korea investigators are combing through footage of the event in the hopes of painting a picture of how the deadly crush unfolded — and whether it could have been prevented. 

‘Just follow the wave’

Ahammed has lived in Itaewon, a neighbourhood known for its vibrant nightlife, for five years. And every year, he attends the Halloween celebrations in his neighbourhood. 

But he’s never seen anything like this. This year marked Itaewon’s first Halloween celebration with no masks or other COVID-19 measures in place since the pandemic began. About 100,000 showed up to party, South Korean officials estimate.

Ahammed and his friends were in an alley when it all started. Some people seemed to be trying to escape onto the main street, 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 cannot stop there. You cannot go back. All you have to do is just follow the wave.”

Ahammed quickly became separated from his friends, he said. Somehow, he made his way to a wall and managed to grab ahold of a railing and pulled himself onto some stairs above the crowd. He could see his friends below him, getting pulled in different directions.

He stayed there, he said, for 30 minutes, until he felt it was safe to come down and try to make his way home. The worst of it appeared to be over, but there were still panicked crowds in the streets.

“When I’m walking, I see, like, people fainting, people screaming, shouting. They’re saying, ‘I cannot breathe.’ They’re saying, like, ‘Stop pushing, stop pulling,'” he said. 

In the midst of the chaos, he didn’t realize the extent of the tragedy. He heard murmuring that some people had fallen, but he had no idea that anyone had died.

But soon, a grim picture started to emerge. He saw an ambulance arrive. Then another. And another. 

First responders, he said, blocked off traffic to the main road, and started bringing people out in the street and performing CPR. They also began lining up bodies on the road, covering them with blankets. A firefighter was walking around counting the dead.

“Then I realized that this is bad — really bad,” Ahammed said. 

Experts say tragedy was preventable 

More than 80 per cent of the dead were in their 20s or 30s and 11 were teenagers, South Korea’s Interior Ministry said.

Among the deceased from 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. A Canadian was injured.

The victim from Sri Lanka, Ahammed said, was his friend. 

“The guy doesn’t drink or smoke. He just went to the street, you know, doing a video call to show his wife how Korean life is, you know, things like that,” he said. “After awhile, he stopped answering the phone, then we realized he passed away.”

One thing Ahammed says he didn’t see much of were police officers. He spotted three or four in total the whole night.

“I [saw] more police costumes than the real police,” he said.

Seoul police assigned 137 officers to manage the Halloween revellers. By contrast, nearly 7,000 police officers were sent to another part of the South Korean capital on Saturday to monitor duelling protests that drew tens of thousands of people, but fewer than the crowds in Itaewon, a police official told The Associated Press.

The national government has 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 workers should have been called on to monitor potential bottleneck points. 

He suggested that the crush may have been prevented if authorities had enforced one-way walking lanes, blocked entry to some narrow pathways, and temporarily closed Itaewon’s subway station to prevent an excessive number of people moving in the same direction.

The deaths should be seen as a “manmade disaster,” said Lee Changmoo, an urban planning professor at Seoul’s Hanyang University.

Ahammed, meanwhile, says it’s hard to point fingers. He says nobody could have foreseen this happening in Korea, a country where large crowds are common, but which has always felt safe. 

“No one was expecting [this was] going to happen,” he said. “Normally, when you go to some festival or something, you cannot see much police. That’s how safe Korea is.”

With files from Reuters and The Associated Press. Interview with Nuhyil Ahammed produced by Chris Harbord.