Merkel Attends Memorial for 21 German Love Parade Victims Crushed to Death
Twenty-one people who were crushed to death a week ago at a music festival in the western German city of Duisburg were remembered today at a memorial service attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel and other German leaders.
The service was this morning in the Salvator Church in Duisburg. German President Christian Wulff and the premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hannelore Kraft, were also there.
The Love Parade, a rave festival that began in Berlin in 1989, moved to Duisburg this year. On July 24, hundreds of thousands of music fans filing into the party venue at an abandoned train station formed a bottleneck in a tunnel and on an entrance ramp. Aside from those killed, hundreds of people who couldn’t escape the crowd or who tried to flee were injured.
“People must reconsider their values,” Kraft said at the church service.
The incident has prompted an investigation into how authorities and organizers lost control of an event that had been licensed for 250,000 attendees. Some estimates have put the number of partygoers at more than a million.
The state’s interior minister, Ralf Jaeger, this week accused the organizer, Lopavent, of failing to divert parts of the crowd that caused the bottleneck. He also criticized the city of Duisburg for its handling of the event’s permit. The probe is being undertaken by investigators from nearby Cologne.
Duisburg Mayor Adolf Sauerland, facing public calls to resign, has insisted that criticism be withheld until all facts are known. He pledged the city will take responsibility for any mistakes.
Lopavent, under event organizer Rainer Schaller, has promised to support the police investigation. Schaller and Axa SA, whose German unit insured the organizer of the event for 7.5 million euros, set up a 1 million-euro ($1.3 million) fund to assist victims’ families.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net; Holger Elfes in Dusseldorf at helfes@bloomberg.net.
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