Lee Sang-min said the government bore limitless responsibility and would work to find the cause of [the] incident.

All the victims have been identified and memorial altars have been set up at the Seoul City Hall, where citizens have been paying their respects.

Jean McKenzie reports.

Four hours before the deadly crush, people could see the disaster coming.

The first call to police was made around this time; the caller predicts what comes next.

People are coming into the alley, but they can't get out.

I barely escaped.

It seems like people are going to be crushed to death.

By the end of the night, 150 people would be dead.

Anybody looking at it should've seen that this was an accident waiting to happen.

It's just if⏤it really felt like it was so preventable.

Police, today, revealed they'd taken numerous of these warning calls.

This solemn bow from South Korea's head of police⏤an acknowledgment they'd failed.

"We think our response to those calls was inadequate," he says, "And I bear a heavy responsibility."

The other question is, why police weren't sent ahead of time to control what was expected to be an enormous crowd.

Because these young people gathered spontaneously, it wasn't clear who was responsible for keeping them safe.

And with this came another admission.

I agree that there was some deficiency in that crowd management, and we will reform and correct [it].

Discarded clothes belonging to the dead are still in the gym where their bodies were first taken

"This tragedy will be a lesson," South Korea's Prime Minister said, "For us to change and become a safer country."

It's unlikely these were the only mistakes. Jean McKenzie, BBC News.

And that report from Jane McKenzie.

Well, I'm joined now by Anthony Kuhn, who's NPR's international correspondent covering Koreas and Japan, and he's based in Seoul.

Anthony, thanks very much for joining us.

I mean, the interior minister has now apologized, the police chief has apologized.

It just really gives you a sense of the public anger and outrage over this.

Yes, well, it's been three days since the incident, and you're only now seeing apologies and you're also seeing these officials walk back earlier remarks that they made.

The interior minister, for example, had said that they did not expect a huge number of people more than in previous years,

and even if they had sent police and emergency responders to the scene there in Seoul's Itaewon neighborhood, it might not have averted the disaster.

Today, he admitted that that was not a good response and that he had not considered adequately the feelings of the bereaved.

So far, nobody has taken responsibility, no official has resigned over this incident.

But, of course, the investigations, both into the causes of the crowd surge and into the government response to it, haven't finished yet.

Once they do, and we find out exactly what happened, it's possible we may see even stronger calls for accountability and some people may have to step down.

Yeah, Anthony, I'm just looking at this timeline, and it says that at 18:34, 6:34 p.m. local time, that's hours before the deadly crush,

the police had received a call saying, you know, these alleys are incredibly narrow and people are getting crushed.

Yes, that's right.

And even without those calls, you know, in recent years, Halloween revelers have just absolutely crammed into the Itaewon area, so, they should have known.

Now, as the police said, they did not⏤admitted they did not have any crowd control going on there at the time.

They had 137 police officers in this district with over 100,000 revelers⏤these very narrow and hilly alleyways,

and the police there were not doing crowd control; they were watching out for street crime and they were directing traffic.

So, of course, anger has been mounting, saying, you know, everybody knew that it was gonna be packed there, everybody knew there are tiny alleyways,

why didn't the police prioritize crowd control, as is the case in other places such as neighboring Japan?

And there have been comparisons made to the ferry disaster about eight years ago, where 300 people died, mostly young people,

and the comparisons are that a lot of investigations took place, a lot of reviews, a lot of discussions about safety measures not being adhered to, and then nothing was done.

So, people are saying they're worried that the same thing will happen with this incident.

Yes, of course; people worry that no lessons are learned in the same man-made disasters occur.

Now, the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014 led to the deaths of more than 300 people, most of them high school students.

But because of the investigation, this led to the downfall of then-President Park Geun-hye.

It's very hard to tell how far this investigation will go and what it could do to the current administration of President Yun Seok-yeol,

who has already been quite... doing quite poorly in terms of public... public approval ratings.

But the potential damage, the potential drop in popularity, depending on what the investigations find is considerable.