DUISBURG, Germany — Crowds of people streaming into a techno-music festival surged through a jammed entry tunnel, setting off a stampede that killed 18 people and injured 80 in western Germany on Saturday.
Other Love Parade revelers initially kept partying at the event in Duisburg, near Dusseldorf, unaware of the deadly panic that started when police tried to prevent thousands more people from entering the jammed parade grounds.
Authorities said it appeared that some or most of the 18 had been crushed to death but also suggested that some of the people killed or injured might have attempted to flee the crowd by jumping over a barrier and falling several yards. Witnesses described a desperate scene, as people piled up on one another or scrambled over others who had fallen in the crush.
“The young people came to celebrate and instead there are dead and injured,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “I am horrified by the suffering and the pain.”
Criticism quickly fell on city officials for allowing only one entrance to the grounds of a hugely popular event that drew hundreds of thousands of people to dance, watch floats and listen to DJs spin.
Emergency workers had trouble getting to the victims in the large tunnel that leads to the festival grounds.
German media reportedthat the cell-phone system in Duisburg broke down temporarily and frantic parents trying to reach their children instead drove to the scene to look for them.
Authorities believe the panic might have first been sparked outside the tunnel when some revelers tried to jump over a barrier and fell, said Wolfgang Rabe, the head of the crisis unit set up by Duisburg city authorities.
Police Commissioner Juergen Kieskemper said that just before the stampede occurred about 5 p.m., police had closed off the area where the parade was being held because it was already overcrowded. They told revelers over loudspeakers to turn around and walk back in the other direction before thepanic broke out, he said.
Eyewitness Udo Sandhoefer told n-tv television that even though no one else was being let in, people still streamed into the tunnel, causing “a real mass panic.”
“At some point the column[of people] got stuck, probably because everything was closed up front, and we saw that the first people were already lying on the ground,” he said.
“Others climbed up the walls and tried somehow to get into the grounds from the side, and the people in the crowd that moved up simply ran over those who were lying on the ground.”
Another witness, a man who wasn’t named, told n-tv the tunnel became so crowded that people began falling. “It got tighter and tighter from minute to minute and at some point everyone just wanted out,” he said. “People were just pushed together until they fell over.”
Duisburg city officials decided at a crisis meeting to let the parade go on to prevent more panic and another stampede, said city spokesman Frank Kopatschek.
It is the worst accident of its kind since nine people were crushed to death and 43 more were injured at a rock festival in Roskilde, Denmark, in 2000. That fatal accident occurred when a huge crowd pushed forward during a Pearl Jam concert.
The Love Parade was once an institution in Berlin, but has been held in the industrial Ruhr region of western Germany since 2007.
Information for this article was contributed by Geir Moulson and Kirsten Grieshaber of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 13 on 07/25/2010