We're staying on top of
breaking news out of South Korea.
Officials now say
at least 59 people have been killed
and some 150 others
injured during a Halloween event.
In Seoul.
CNN's Will Ripley
is there now on the scene.
Well, what are you learning
Fred, arriving here.
We got this stunning news
from from the fire
officials who have been
responding out here.
About 900 or so police and firefighters
here on the scene.
And the news is just about as bad as
as we could have imagined.
I was walking past people
in Halloween costumes on the phone,
absolutely sobbing,
calling their family members
to let them know that they're okay.
You can see that
there are stretchers out here
waiting to see
if there are any more people
who need to be taken to the hospital.
But the videos that have been appearing
on social media, combined
with the emergency alerts,
we knew that something
something really awful had happened here.
This is to set the scene for you, Fred.
This is the Itaewon.
Is it possible to go through here, CNN,
just through here. Thank you.
This is the Itaewon
nightclub district in Seoul.
It is iconic for
among other major holidays, Halloween.
People fly in
from all over the region here in Asia
to come here
to celebrate Halloween in Itaewon.
Come over here, Charlie.
If we can just let's see.
I just want to take you down
this row of emergency vehicles here.
And you can see this line of stretchers.
So so all the hotels
in this area are sold out.
And it was actually at the Hamilton Hotel
which is right here to my right.
To my left. Excuse me.
There was a
Halloween party,
and apparently some sort of an incident
happened. People fell down.
It's been described in local media
as a stampede,
but people essentially were crushed.
They fell.
Let's get a closer here.
And people raced out into the street.
A lot of the streets
here are very, very densely packed.
There were
tens of thousands of people out here.
And the videos on social media showed
people in costume
lying on the ground, not moving
and suffered cardiac arrest.
We now know.
59 of those people at least
did not make it.
And so the videos that we that we saw
and we were afraid that people
might might actually be dead
on the street there.
It turns out they were
others were taken to area hospitals.
They've had to open up
extra hospital beds.
You have the president of South Korea.
He convened an emergency meeting of
of his of his disaster management team.
They have it
they have a disaster management
medical team on scene here now.
So this is a federal
this is a federal incident.
Undoubtedly got to be one of the worst
that they've seen here
in Seoul in quite some time,
although I don't have
historical statistics
to back that up yet.
But just
the looks on people's faces out here
looks of disbelief
at these scenes of of hundreds
and hundreds
of of emergency medical personnel
and earlier just rows of people's
bodies on the street.
So whether some sort of
media area here, Fred.
Yeah, go ahead. Yes.
So I'm wondering, John,
I just want to make sure I understand.
So you're saying
the party was taking place
inside the hotel.
Something happened
and then there was a stampede
and it was outside in
which people would just start collapsing
or were there people
who who
were physically in trouble
and had been taken out of the building?
And then you saw,
you know,
what appeared to be bodies
on the ground with sheets over
So that's a very good question.
One thing I'll point out to you
is that if you look at
if we can actually give you a wide look,
if you look at the sidewalks around
here, Charlie just said,
you know, it's not it's not a very, very
narrow area here.
And this is an area where earlier
there were videos of people on the ground
So while we're still trying
to piece together from authorities
exactly how this all went down,
what is clear
is that there were a lot of people
crowded into a particular area
and at least 81
people called
saying that they couldn't breathe.
They called emergency services
saying that they had trouble breathing.
You had cardiac arrest you know.
59 people dying.
Were people who fell?
Were they crushed
where most of the deaths
from cardiac arrest?
We're still waiting for the specifics.
Fred.
Clearly, there are a lot of questions
that still need to be answered here.
This is an investigation
that is just getting underway
and they have so much work to do.
Not to mention
notifying the families of those
are really going
to make it home for this Halloween party.
Oh, it's heartbreaking.
Will Ripley, thank you so much.
So, of course,
still trying to figure out what
what may have induced
cardiac arrest or suffocation,
what led to the deaths of now.
59 people there and
so many others injured.