Germany’s Merkel to interrupt holiday for memorial of music festival victims

Germany plans memorial for music festival victims

BERLIN — A memorial service will be held on Saturday for the 20 people crushed to death when a panic broke out in a jammed tunnel at the Love Parade techno festival, German officials said Tuesday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff will attend the ceremony, according to their offices. Merkel’s office said she would interrupt a summer vacation to attend.

The memorial will be held at a church in Duisburg, the city in Germany’s western industrial region where the disaster occurred on Saturday. More than 500 people were injured.

The cause of death for all 20 victims was chest contusion, meaning they were crushed to death, said Hannelore Kraft, the state governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Duisburg is located.

Organizers and authorities have come under fire for allegedly trying to squeeze as many as 1.4 million revelers into too small a space and for allowing the party to go on even after the deaths.

There has been some confusion about what exactly triggered the mass panic, and some have speculated that the chaos began after some of the victims fell to their deaths from a ramp they had climbed to escape the crush of the crowd.

The last person to die was a young German woman who was buried beneath several others. She was unconscious for two days in the hospital before succumbing to internal injuries late Monday, according to Dr. Martin Pfohl, a physician at the Bethesda hospital in Duisburg.