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By Christopher Leake
Death toll: Seventeen people died in a tunnel in the city of Duisburg, Germany after a crush in this tunnel at the Love Parade festivalCrush began after 'police tried to restrict access to area'
Revellers attempted to climb walls to escape scene
At least 80 others injured, 20 in serious condition
Seventeen people were killed and 80 injured last night when mass panic broke out at a German music festival.
The victims were crushed and emergency workers had trouble getting through to them after a stampede during the annual Love Parade techno music festival in the city of Duisburg, attended by up to 1.4million people.
Witnesses described piles of bodies stacked on top of each other and revellers climbing walls to escape the crush.
One man slumps to the ground exhausted after escaping the crush (left) while a woman has to be helped away by friendsMany were pinned shoulder to shoulder in the tunnel and unable to move. People standing on the motorway bridge above the scene could only watch helpless as at least 15 were crushed to death.
Duisburg police director Ralf Klauckmass said there had been ‘mass panic’.
The stampede broke out after authorities tried to stop thousands from entering the area where the parade was being held in the grounds of an old freight depot.
Police said that of the 80 people who were hurt, at least 20 were severely injured.
Foreign Office officials said it was not known last night if any Britons were among the dead at the popular festival north of Dusseldorf. But it is thought large numbers of British fans were in the audience.
Desperate: Revellers clung on to stairs and tried to climb walls to escape the crush which began after thousands entered the tunnelEyewitnesses told last night of the stampede. ‘It was hell,’ said Karl Lowenstein, 21, who was in the tunnel. ‘It was dark and it was full. Something happened – whether someone tripped or someone fell I don’t know.
'But there was a stampede to get to the other end and those who fell, well, many of them never got up again.’
Kevin Krausgartner, 21, said: ‘I have never seen anything like it. I saw 25 people piled on top
of one another in a huge heap. I cried.
‘People couldn’t get any air. I saw the dead there. One person was completely pale and I wanted to give him some water, but a medic said that wouldn’t help him – he was gone. I saw police on the bridge just standing there. They didn’t do anything.’
Horrific: Two bodies lie covered by blankets at the entrance to the tunnel on the industrial estate
Emergency: Police run to the scene of the crush but there was little that could be done for some victims'There was no escape,' one Love Parade participant named Marius told the Bild.de website. 'People were pressed into the wall. I was afraid I'd die.'
One woman raver told Bild: 'I was lucky. I found a hole to escape through but two women were killed right next to me.'
Another man described trying to give one of the injured water to be told by a rescue worker 'don't bother with him, he's dead.'
One woman said getting through the tunnel as 'trying to pass through the eye of a needle.'
'The tunnel was too narrow to cope with the number of people taking the short-cut and should have been closed by crowd controllers before the parade even began,' she said.
There were scenes of complete chaos (left) as revellers tried desperately to escape the area: Ambulances were lined up to ferry the injured to hospital
Breakdown in crowd control: A general view of the area in the shows how many people were crammed into the tunnel at the time of the crush
Emergency services tend to the injured: 'In the tunnel people couldn't move - they couldn't go backwards or forwards and that's when the panic broke out'Police and ambulance workers were later seen giving the kiss of life to victims.
Many people continued partying as the air was filled with the noise of emergency sirens, unaware of the tragedy taking place.
Rescue squads had to fight their way through an ocean of people but ten other victims were resuscitated.
A state of emergency was declared in the city last night. Although more than 1,200 police officers were on duty, they said they were powerless to prevent the tragedy.
A police spokesman said: ‘It is a catastrophe that we are struggling to cope with.’
Police commissioner Jurgen Kieskemper said: ‘The situation is chaotic.’ He later added it was a ‘miracle’ that the number of wounded was ‘quite low’.
Rescue: An injured woman is carried away on a stretcher before being taken to hospital
Walking wounded: Revellers walk away from the scene after escaping with minor injuries Another witness, named as Fabio, claimed he tried to warn police before the stampede that trouble was brewing.
‘A friend and I got out as hundreds more poured in,’ he said. ‘We tried to tell the police to close it down but they didn’t listen. This was 45 minutes before people were killed.’
People had been using the tunnel as a short-cut on the Love Parade, which consisted of 15 floats which set off at 2pm.
Despite the scale of the tragedy unfolding at the entrance to a former freight rail station, the one-day techno festival continued as planned.
Organisers feared cancelling the event would only cause a second panic.
Over 1.5 million revellers had gathered for the annual techno music festival in Duisburg, which is near Dusseldorf.
Popular: Around 1.5million people were attending this year's Love Parade which used to be held in BerlinIt had emerged that police had warned Love Parade organisers that there would be problems with crowd control if this year's event was held in the city centre.
Instead, the festival was moved a mile out of Duisburg to a less enclosed area. But the decision appears to have backfired.
They told revellers over loudspeakers to turn around and walk back in the direction they had come from before the panic broke out, he said.
Meanwhile other revellers, still oblivious to the tragic events unfolding in another part of the parade, continue to party.
The Love Parade was once an institution in Berlin, but has been held in the industrial Ruhr region of western Germany since 2007.
The original Berlin Love Parade grew from a 1989 peace demonstration into a huge outdoor celebration of club culture that drew about 1.5 million people at its peak in 1999.
But it suffered from financial problems and tensions with city officials in later years, and eventually moved.
source: dailymail
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