At least 18 people died at the Love Parade music festival in Germany today when they were crushed inside a tunnel during a stampede caused by panic. A further 10 people had to be resuscitated, while about 200 people were injured, nine of them critically.
The disaster happened when revellers took a short cut through a tunnel that was too narrow to cope with the crowds.
An estimated 1.4 million people took part in the world's largest techno music festival, held in the western city of Duisburg for the first time. Most of the ravers continued to dance into the early evening, unaware of the tragedy.
Officials decided not to inform the crowd about the incident, saying it was safer to let the event continue rather than create more panic.
Scuffles began to break out in the late afternoon, when thousands of angry people entered the tunnel to get easier access to the overcrowded festival grounds after being told by police at the entrance to the event that it was closed due to overcapacity. Police said the passageway quickly turned into a bottleneck, describing it as being like trying to get through "the eye of a needle". Those inside panicked and a stampede ensued.
Kevin Krausgartner, 21, who was in the tunnel when panic broke out, told Welt Online of the "gruesome scenes" he had witnessed. "I've never seen anything like it," he said. "There were 25 people lying in a heap. I screamed – people could no longer get any air. I saw dead people, and one person was sitting there looking extremely pale. I wanted to give him some water, but the ambulance medic told me there was no point as he was already dead." Krausgarnter said he saw police "standing on the bridge and doing nothing".
Eyewitness Udo Sandhoefer said some people climbed up the walls of the tunnel in an attempt to get into the grounds from the side. "People in the crowd that moved up simply ran over those who were lying on the ground."
There were signs earlier in the day that Duisburg was finding it hard to cope with the number of fans trying to get to the event, which took place in a disused goods train depot on the outskirts of the industrial city.
Before the crush, visitors had begun spilling out beyond the grounds, which were surrounded with wire fencing, and on to the A59 highway, which had been closed to traffic but was kept open for emergency vehicles. In the event, ambulances had difficulty reaching the grounds due to the number of people who had spilled on to the road to escape overcrowding. Police chief Jürgen Kieskemper described the scenes as "utter chaos", and said: "We have to get to the bottom of what actually happened here."
The Love Parade is one of the most popular music events in the world and prides itself as a peaceful event. It began in Berlin in 1989, inspired by the spirit of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in its heyday in the 1990s attracted 1.6 million people from around the world.
Questions had been asked as to whether Duisburg, a city of 500,000, was capable of holding such a large event, which suited Berlin, where crowds spilled across its wide avenues and into parks, preventing overcrowding.