JakartaPost-Oct 3, 2022
At least 125 people were killed, and a hundred more were injured, in a stampede after a soccer match in Malang regency, East Java, on Saturday night, in Indonesia’s worst-ever stadium incident. Tens of thousands of fans rushed out of the stadium when police fired tear gas, a move that critics have deemed excessive and the main cause of the stampede. The deadly incident took place after home team Arema FC lost 3-2 in a top league Liga 1 match against their regional rival, Persebaya Surabaya, at the Kanjuruhan Stadium. In a classic display of rowdy Indonesian sports fans, the home crowd, nicknamed Aremania, took to the pitch to express their frustration. Out of the 40,000 people in attendance, around 3,000 rushed to the pitch while the rest remained at the stands, East Java Police chief Inspector General Nico Afinta told a press conference on Sunday morning. “In response, we did some crowd control measures, including using tear gas, as they had started to engage in anarchic behavior. They had started attacking the police and had vandalized police vehicles,” he said. The tear gas incited hysteria among the crowd and they rushed for the exit, resulting in a stampede and pile-ups by the exit. This, according to Nico, was when some members of the crowd started to suffocate due to the lack of oxygen, and the chaos resulted in the immediate deaths of 34 people, while the rest died on the way to or while being treated at the nearest hospitals. Nico insisted that had the crowd remained civil, the police would not have resorted to such drastic actions. But many critics and human rights organizations pointed out the police’s choice of using tear gas, which has been banned by world soccer’s governing body FIFA, as the main culprit behind the deadly stampede. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2022/10/02/at-least-125-killed-in-soccer-stampede.html.
