19 people killed at Love Parade

[Gunitsoldier]

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.p...edy-2010-07-26

The mayor of the German city of Duisburg was under intense pressure to quit Monday two days after a panicked stampede at the Love Parade left 19 people dead.

Authorities had reportedly been warned the western city was too small to hold one of Europe's biggest techno music festivals, while security arrangements have been slammed as being woefully inadequate.

"Even if prosecutors are still conducting their investigation, it is clear the Duisburg city officials failed completely," the local Neue Rhein Zeitung, or NRZ, said in an editorial. "Even on the evening of the accident, while seriously injured people were dying in hospital, officials were cowardly trying to talk their way of it and even defending their security plan."

Mayor Adolf Sauerland, who staunchly defended what he said was a "solid security plan at a news conference on Sunday, has come under fierce attack. "The cynical reaction of the mayor, who said the victims' behavior was partly to blame, was unacceptable," wrote the NRZ paper. "His scandalous position was nothing less than a mockery of the dead - of young people who came from afar to party and who died because of your overburdened organisation."

Police said that the 11 women and eight men died as they scrambled to escape from a crush in a narrow, 100-meter tunnel that served as the only entrance to the festival grounds. The dead were aged between 20 and 40 and included seven foreigners, from Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, China, Bosnia and Spain. More than 340 people were injured.

Television pictures showed lifeless bodies being passed over the heads of those frantically trying to escape while oblivious revelers danced. "I saw dead people in the tunnel, others alive but unconscious on the ground," said Anneke Kuypers, an 18-year-old from New Zealand. "Others were crying."

German-born Pope Benedict XVI and Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed their horror, with the German leader calling it a "very, very dreadful and sad day" and demanding a "very intensive investigation."

Flags were at half-mast in the small, western German city on Monday after Saturday's tragedy, and in the surrounding region. At the entrance to the tunnel, where dozens of candles and an impromptu remembrance board with hundreds of signatures marked the dead, there were furious messages for the organizers.

"This event should never have taken place here," read one. "You should be ashamed of yourselves," said another. Monday's edition of the daily Stadt-Anzeiger in nearby Cologne said the mayor had been warned in writing in October 2009 that the grounds were too narrow for the expected crowds but that the concerns went unheeded.

Spiegel magazine said on its website that the festival only had authorization for 250,000 revelers instead of for 1.4 million people who organizers said had attended. Prosecutors have begun an investigation


tl;dr: Way too many people at the Love Parade in Duisburg (1.4 million while it can hold 250,000) , Police direct the crowd to a tunnel that again is way too small for the enormous crowd, people try to escape by going up a small staircase that's near the entrance of the tunnel , panic erupts , crowd rushes for the stairs and trample 19 people.

Organisation and the police are to blame for these deaths and yet they deny everything.


When this happened I was at a festival myself in Belgium (Tomorrowland). Later that day I went to see David Guetta who told Tomorrowland that he refused to play at Love Parade earlier cause of this horrible tragedy. Needless to say the whole festival was in shock.

[SephYuyX]

One thread wasnt needed, let alone two :/

[Gunitsoldier]

Didn't find the other D:
edit: found now ! can delete this , was just posting it since i didnt find it before

[SephYuyX]

I was trying to find the first thread to post as a source here, then I couldnt find it, and wondered if I imagined it.

[tyven]

i blame it on the drug abuse

[SephYuyX]

Oh god, you really did make that your sig.

[tyven]

now thats a love stampede

[Edgie]

damit Tyven that leaves nothing to the imagination...

[Priran]

so mayor adolf's planning led to a bunch of foreigners being crammed into a tiny space and killed

I think that kind of irony is banned in germany