Picture credit: Action Press/Rex Features

Love Parade tragedy

German chancellor Angela Merkel has ordered an enquiry, calling for ‘intense examination’ into the circumstances leading to the deaths of 19 people at the Love Parade music festival in Duisburg on July 24.

A further 342 people were injured trying to escape a crush around a brick entrance tunnel when the arena, at a disused railyard, reached capacity and the gates were closed.

An estimated 1.4m people are thought to have travelled to the free event, which was first held on the streets of Berlin in 1989. Local reports suggest the site only had capacity for 250,000.

“We turned up around 3:00pm and there was already a bottleneck where the two tunnels met at the entrance to the arena,” one British festivalgoer told Access. “The police started to pull down the barriers so that we could crawl up the embankments, but that would have become impossible as the crowd filled back into the tunnels. There was space at the other end of the arena but you couldn’t get there and there weren’t any signs, in German or English, to make it clear where you had to go, or any guidance from stewards or police.”

Rainer Wendt, leader of Germany's police union, told Bild newspaper his organisation had warned organisers that the site was ‘too narrow, too small to manage the masses of people’.

A decision was initially taken to continue the event to prevent further panic among those inside the arena, before it was called to a halt later in the evening.

“The Love Parade was always a peaceful and joyous party,” organiser Rainer Schaller said afterwards. “Out of respect for the victims, families and friends, we will discontinue the event. The Love Parade is no more.”

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