DUISBURG (Germany) — The Love Parade will never be held again, one of its organi­sers said yesterday, a day after 19 people were killed in a stampede at the techno-dance party.

“Words are not enough to describe the extent of the shock I feel,” Rainer Schaller told a news conference in the west German city of Duisburg where the tragedy occurred.

Schaller said every effort will be made to find the exact cause of Saturday afternoon’s tragic events, which also left more than 300 injured.

People were trampled to death and crushed in the crowd passing through a tunnel to the entrance of the festival, attended by over one million people.

The Love Parade, one of the world’s lar­gest electronic music events, was founded in Berlin in 1989 as a peace parade shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Authorities prepared to face tough questions at a press conference over why hundreds of thousands of people were funnelled through a single highway underpass into the former freight railway station used to host the annual Love Parade.

German media reported that there were at least 1,4 million people, but police did not immediately confirm that estimate.

Witnesses said officers in Duisburg, a city near Duesseldorf in western Germany, closed the end of the tunnel emptying on to the festival grounds after they become overcrowded around 5 pm.

They told revellers over loudspeakers to turn around and walk back in the other direction.

But the entrance to the tunnel did not appear to have been closed and people continued piling in, sparking panic and then a deadly crush.

Witnesses described a desperate scene, as people piled up on each other or scrambled over others who had fallen.

Party goer Udo Sandhoefer told German news channel n-tv that even though no one else was being let in, people still streamed into the tunnel, causing “a real mass panic”.

“At some point the column [of people] got stuck, probably because everything was closed up front, and we saw that the first people were already lying on the ground,” he said.

City officials chose not to evacuate the site, fearing it might spark more panic. Many people continued partying, unaware of the deaths.

Rescue workers carried away the injured as techno music thundered in the background.

Other workers had trouble getting to the victims, hampered by the huge crowds.

Local media reported that the cellphone system in Duisburg broke down temporarily and frantic parents trying to reach their children instead drove to the scene to look for them.

However, most streets downtown were blocked by police and the highways leading to the city were jammed.

Several media outlets also reported that rescue helicopters had problems taking away the heavily injured because there was not enough space for them to land.

German authorities also have not identified the victims yet, but the Dutch Foreign Ministry said that a 22-year-old Dutch man was among then.

The original Berlin Love Parade grew to a huge outdoor celebration of club culture that drew about 1,5 million people at its peak in 1999, but suffered from financial problems and tensions with city officials in later years, and was eventually moved.