Berlin, July 25: A stampede inside a tunnel at a popular techno music festival killed 19 people and injured dozens more on Saturday, police officials said.
It was unclear exactly what set off the panic among the throngs of young people squeezing into the tunnel leading to festival grounds in the western German city of Duisburg, but the police said they had tried to close off the area because of overcrowding just before the stampede.
The police reported telling the crowd to turn around and walk in the other direction before the panic broke out.
The scene was so chaotic that other festival attendees, unaware of the deaths, kept dancing and listening to music for some time, news services said.
Rescuers reported delays in reaching injured people because of the size of the crowd. News reports said more than a million people were attending the festival.
“It's a horror situation especially because rescuers cannot get through to those injured,” Mr Thomas Muenten, a reporter for ZDF, said in the early evening. “The people literally trampled each other on the way into this tunnel.”
Photos and television images of the scene after the crush showed many young people looking dazed, with personal items that had been left behind scattered around them.
“There were piles of injured on the ground, some being resuscitated, others dead and covered with sheets,” Isabel Schloesser, 18, said.
The music event, called the Love Parade, is one of Europe's biggest electronic music gatherings, attracting young people from many countries.
The German Chancellor, Ms Angela Merkel, expressed her condolences and said she was “horrified that young people went to party and were instead met by death and injuries.”
The police said thousands of young people were still waiting to get into the festival when officers closed the area. At one point, it was impossible for people to move forward or backward in or near the tunnel.
As people felt stuck, the witnesses said, they panicked. “At some point the column of people got stuck, probably because it was closed up front and we saw that the first people were already lying on the ground,” Mr Udo Sandhoefer said.
But an emergency services official, Mr Wolfgang Rabe, told ARD television that some people had tried to enter the area by climbing a fence along a ramp and fell, possibly starting the panic.
The Love Parade, started in 1989 as a peace demonstration, was held for years in Berlin but has been held in the Ruhr region since 2007.