The tragedy in South Korea on Halloween, in which at least 154 people were crushed to death in an alleyway, has a grim historic precedent nearly 80 years before, in wartime London.
In the 1943 Bethnal Green disaster, 173 people lost their lives on the steps down to the entrance to Bethnal Green underground station. The victims, mostly women and children, were sheltering from an air raid. But the witness accounts given in an inquiry after the disaster and interviews with survivors are astonishingly similar to reports of what happened in South Korea.
