Love Parade disaster
Map of the Love Parade in Duisburg
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| Date | 24 July 2010 |
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| Location | Duisburg, Germany |
| Deaths | 21 |
| Non-fatal injuries | 500+ |
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 1.4 million 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 () 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.
With 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.
Entrance should have been granted at 11:00, but was granted at 12:00 CEST. A 240-metre tunnel from the east and a series of underpasses from the west met at a ramp that was supposed to be the only entrance and exit point of the festival area. A smaller ramp existed between the underpasses from the west. Because of overcrowding, police at the entrance began announcing over loudspeakers that new arrivals should turn around and head back. The side of the tunnel that was the entry of the parade area was closed, but people continued to enter the tunnel from the rear, despite being told it was closed. The deaths occurred as the ramp between tunnel underpasses and the festival area became overcrowded.
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