EMERGENCY CALLERS AMONG VICTIMS

[Anchor Lead]

Now turning to updated news related to the Itaewon tragedy. It was known that the first emergency call reporting of a casualty was made at 10:15 p.m. on the 29th. However, many people died even after emergency calls were made to the rescue service, and it was also found that callers who made the emergency calls themselves died in the crowd crush as well. Callers who desperately held on to their phones asking for help at 10:42 and 11:01 pm could not be rescued.

[Pkg]

A hundred emergency calls were made to the rescue service from 10:15 p.m. on the day of the deadly stampede in Itaewon. Some of the calls were specific iterating that people were being crushed to death. Others ended without a single word. These emergency calls are yet another indicator of how desperate the situation was at the time. Two calls made at 10:42 p.m. and 11:01 p.m. were among them. The former was not even recorded by the fire department. While the other call made at 11:01 p.m. implies that the caller could not respond to the rescue worker. The records only read, "there was a lot of noise." The special investigation headquarters has found that both callers died in the crowd crush. The investigators put the pieces together after comparing the callers' phone numbers with the names of the owners of phones collected at the tradedy site. The person who called at 11:01 apparently tried to survive the crush for nearly 50 minutes after the disaster began, but eventually passed away. That was the critical time during which many lives could have been saved. The fire department's radio records made at approximately the same time contain the chief commander's remarks, "about 30 people fell" and "the situation will likely end soon." The chief of the Yongsan Fire Station began issuing commands by radio at 11:05 p.m. Around 11:09, the chief of the Yongsan Police Station ordered police troops to guide the crowd to the main road. Just then, the mobile situation rooms where rescue officials had gathered, reported that more than 30 people were receiving CPR. This and other pieces of evidence indicate that authorities failed to grasp the situation properly and missed many details. The special investigators are looking at if rescue operations were conducted properly after the emergency calls. They will likely decide soon on whether to request arrest warrants for the major suspects.