Love Parade disaster

On 24 July 2010, a crowd disaster at the 2010 Love Parade electronic dance music festival in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, caused the death of 21 people from suffocation. At least 500 more were injured.The Love Parade was a popular and free-access music festival and parade that originated in 1989 in Berlin. The parade featured stages, but had floats with music, DJs and dancers moving through the audience. The Love Parade in Duisburg was the first time that the festival had been held in a closed-off area. Between 200,000 and people were reported to be attending the event and 3,200 police were on hand.As a consequence of the disaster, the organizer of the festival announced that no further Love Parades would be held and that the festival was permanently cancelled. Criminal charges were brought against ten employees of the city of Duisburg and of the company that organized the event, but eventually rejected by the court due to the prosecutors' failure to establish evidence for the alleged acts of negligence and their causal connection to the deaths. On the 24th April 2017 the State Supreme Court Dusseldorf (Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf) stated that it would be reopening court proceedings for prosecution of 10 people involved in planning the event, accusing them of negligent homicide and mayhem.IncidentWith the slogan "The Art of Love", the event was one of the program elements of RUHR.2010, an effort to highlight cultural events in the Ruhr area, one of 2010's European Capitals of Culture. The festival was staged on the area of a former freight station. The capacity of the enclosed location was limited to 250,000 people, but more than one million visitors were expected, based on the experience of previous years.