By Chris Chang, posted May 31, 2010 at 10:02 PM, 1,740 views,

Korean Pop Concert Causes Human Stampede at Shanghai Expo

A music event was held in the Shanghai expo and this caused a stampede with one death reported. The big star of the concert, Super Junior, has attracted thousands of fans and free tickets were given for admission. However, there are only 5000 tickets available…

Just in case you don’t anything about K-pop, South Korea loves to organize concerts of their major superstars -BoA, Super Junior… in countries of Asia. These superstars have a lot of Chinese fans and their shows sell out at 10,000+ seated stadiums each year they go to Shanghai or other locations in China. This year in Shanghai Expo, you get the chance to the see most popular boy band holding a live concert at the Expo Culture Center.

The concert has made a big influence on the locals’ views on those crazy fans. Firstly, there were hundreds of female fans lining up at the gates of Expo during midnight. In order to watch the concert, you need to get an Expo ticket and line up at the center, then you could use the Expo ticket to exchange for the concert ticket without any additional charges. So, it’s regarded as a free admission for all people in Shanghai Expo. Unfortunately, the tickets are limited.

Tickets had been snatched up within five minutes of distributing. The fans are mad since they think the staff kept the remaining tickets for themselves secretly. Soon, the crowd get violent and a witness on the internet said that “several girls were stepped on and over by several guys. So messy, so messy, All the crying and yelling turned into one big wave. There were so many shoes. One girl even fell from the second floor.” During the mess, big batches of security guards appeared to block the fans. Over hundreds of people were injured, and according to the Expo official report, the roads leading to the Expo Culture Center were blocked by fans and armed police had to be dispatched to keep order.

Video – Live report from Japan Nippon News Network

Video 2 – Live video from a witness on the internet

Video 3 – News Video Report from HK Apple Daily

According to Apple Daily report, there was a quite number of girls scolding and beating the security guards because all tickets were gone in a short time. People watching from the sidelines pick on these crazy fans. They think these girls are not educated well and some people even call their actions a “disgrace”. Some of the girls heard this and they ordered the people to shut up, since these people do not know them. For the netizens, they do not understand what these girls are doing for.

Well, we can see that the Shanghai Expo is in a terrible mess. For this news, the Chinese media did not talk much about it and we can only look for more info on the reports outside of China. It seems like the bad news from Shanghai Expo are being covered up as much as possible. By the way, there will be another concert at Shanghai Expo very soon, another boy band from Japan, SMAP, is going to make a performance too. We hope we don’t see a second stampede…

UPDATE: News spokeswoman from the Korean Pavilion stated that there are no deaths for the stampede at Shanghai Expo. All tickets were successfully distributed and the concert carried out without any problems. [HK Apple Daily]

Sources: HK Apple Daily, Epoch Times, Lianhe Zaobao