At least 15 people dead after stampede at music festival in Duisburg

This article is more than 10 years old

This article is more than 10 years old

At least 15 people have been killed and dozens injured in a stampede after mass panic broke out at a music festival in Germany, police have said.

The deaths occurred in a tunnel at the Love Parade in the city of Duisburg in the west of the country, where thousands had gathered for the annual techno music festival.

Thousands of other revellers kept partying at the event near Duesseldorf, unaware of the deadly stampede that started when police tried to block thousands more people from entering the already-jammed grounds.

A reporter for German newspaper Bild, Frank Schneider, who was at the festival, said: "I alone have counted 11 dead, it looked shocking."

He said the dead were covered with sheets.

An 18-year-old festivalgoer, Marius, told Bild: "There was no escape, people were standing over me like a wall. I was afraid I'd die."

Another raver told the newspaper: "I was lucky, found a small gap, but two women next to me died."

Police confirmed that there were at least 15 deaths. Another 10 people had to be resuscitated, reports said.

The German news agency DAPD reported that the stampede broke out after authorities tried to stop thousands of people from entering the area where the parade was being held.

The victims were crushed and that emergency workers had trouble getting through to them, the news agency said.

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.