Two American college students were among the 154 people killed in a crowd disaster during Halloween celebrations in the South Korean capital of Seoul on Saturday night.
South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared a week-long period of national mourning on Sunday for those who lost their lives in the crush that resulted after as many as 100,000 revellers packed tightly into the Itaewon nightlife district.
Among the dead was Anna Gieske, 20, an American nursing student at the University of Kentucky who had been studying abroad in South Korea and recording her travels on Instagram.
"I have the incredibly sad responsibility to inform you of the loss of one of our students over the weekend," said university president Eli Capilouto in a statement to students and faculty on Sunday.
"There aren’t adequate or appropriate words to describe the pain of a beautiful life cut short. It isn’t fair, nor is it comprehensible. It is loss and it hurts in ways that are impossible to articulate.
Steven Blesi, a 20-year-old student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, was also killed in the disaster, according to his father Steve Blesi.
"We just got confirmation our son died," said Mr Blesi Sr on Twitter on Sunday. “Thank you for the outpouring of love. We need time to grieve.
He told The New York Times: "[My son] was an adventurous spirit and a loving spirit. That’s the only way I know how to describe him. And the loss is just unbearable.”
It is not yet clear exactly how or why the disaster happened. South Korean police have formed a nearly 600-strong task force to investigate the incident.
However, early reports and statements by emergency services officials suggest that this was a crowd crush, in which people were trapped so tightly together, or under so much weight from people who have fallen on top of them, that they could not breathe.
Witnesses and survivors described a "hell-like" chaos of people falling on each other "like dominoes", with the entire Itaewon area jammed with vehicles and crowds of partygoers that prevented rescuers from reaching the victims.
It was reportedly the first public Halloween celebration in three years following the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, and most of the dead were teenagers or adults in their twenties.
A crowd crush at a football match in Indonesia killed 130 people earlier this month, while a similar event at the Astroworld Festival in Texas killed 10 people last year.
