The mayor of the German city of Duisburg faced intense pressure to quit yesterday, two days after a panicked stampede at the Love Parade festival left 19 people dead.
Officials said seven foreigners from Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, China, Bosnia and Spain were among those killed on Saturday at the Love Parade. More than 340 people were injured.
Authorities had reportedly been warned the city was too small to host one of Europe’s biggest techno music festivals, while security arrangements have been slammed as being woefully inadequate.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“Even if prosecutors are still conducting their investigation, it is clear Duisburg city officials failed completely,” the local Neue Rhein Zeitung (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 out of it and even defending their security plan,” the newspaper said.
Prosecutors have begun an enquiry into what German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm told reporters was a “whole range of open questions.”
“A full picture and a proper analysis of what happened and what mistakes were possibly made can however only be done once the investigation is completed,” he said.
Duisburg Mayor Adolf Sauerland, who staunchly defended what he said was a “solid” security plan at a news conference on Sunday, and who was reportedly pelted with rubbish, 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, one of several newspapers to focus on his role.
“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 organization,” the paper said.
The paper’s readers were equally furious.
Karsten Ophardt from Duisburg wrote: “Resign immediately,” adding that the mayor’s view that the security plan had worked was a “slap in the face” for the dead.
Sauerland said yesterday that he had not ruled out stepping down.
“Yesterday and today the question of who was responsible was asked, including about me. I will ask myself this question,” he told radio station WDR2.
Police said that the 11 women and eight men died as they scrambled to escape from a crush in a narrow, 100m tunnel that served as the only entrance to the festival grounds.
Television pictures on Saturday showed lifeless bodies being passed over the heads of those frantically trying to escape while oblivious revelers danced.
Flags were at half-mast in the city yesterday after the tragedy, and in the surrounding region.
At the entrance to the tunnel, where hundreds of candles, bouquets of flowers 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,” another said.
Yesterday’s edition of the daily Stadt-Anzeiger in nearby Cologne said the mayor had been warned in writing in October last year that the grounds were too narrow for the expected crowds but that the concerns went unheeded.
Spiegel magazine said on its Web site that the festival only had authorization for 250,000 revelers instead of for 1.4 million people who organizers said had attended.
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