By: THE LOVE PARADE TRAGEDY IN GERMANY (2010)
The Love Parade, which is the popular electronic dance music festival and parade in Germany, will never be held again after the stampede has left 19 dead and over 340 injured at 5 p.m. on Saturday, July 24, 2010, in the city of Duisburg. This was the announcement of Love Parade organiser Rainer Scheller in a press conference on Sunday.
According to Head of an emergency task force Wolfgang Rabe, the police had tried to close the tunnel entrance about thirty minutes before the chaos broke out. He said that some people tried to enter the area even though it was already closed. Those people climbed a fence on the west side of the entry ramp and that’s what they think the cause of the mass panic.
The founder of the Love Parade Matthias Roeingh and the Love Parade stampede survivors blamed the organizers and the city mayor for the deaths. They said that there’s only one single tunnel entrance to the party area which could not accommodate even half of the attendees.
According to an interview made by FOX News, the leader of a major German police union, Rainer Wendt, said that it’s not only the tunnel entrance which causes the problem but also the location of the event. They knew that Duisburg was too narrow and too small to accommodate huge masses of people. They have warned the organizers and the authorities about a year ago but was just neglected.
Deputy police chief Detlef von Schmeling said in the conference that none of the 14 people who died in the stampede were found in the entry tunnel. He also said that they cannot confirm the number of people who attended the event. He said that the area was big enough to hold a maximum of 250,000 – 350,000 people but media reports estimated that there were about 1.4 million in the event.
The exact circumstances of the stampede are not clear. The organizers headed by Rainer Scheller, Duisburg mayor Adolf Sauerland, and the city authorities of this year’s Love Parade could not answer other questions from the media but German prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation to know how the stampede starts and to know the reason why many people had become trapped inside a 200-meter long tunnel entrance.
IMAGE CREDIT: Xinhua/Reuters
