Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster

A derby that had long been tinder

For years the Arema–Persebaya fixture carried the electric ambivalence of local pride and danger. It was more than a match; it was ritual. Scarves and drums, chants that hardened into rivalries, a stadium that could swell to roughly forty thousand people on big nights — Kanjuruhan was a place where identity and emotion braided tightly. Indonesian football has long struggled with infrastructure and crowd-control challenges; on this night those strains would meet a single, fatal decision.

The game itself was dramatic. Persebaya Surabaya left Kanjuruhan with a 3–2 victory. But it was not the scoreline that would be remembered; it was what happened in the minutes after the final whistle — a sequence of crowd behavior, policing choices, and structural shortcomings that combined into one of the deadliest stadium tragedies in modern football history.

The whistle and the first trespassers

It began, as many disasters do, with a small breach that should have been containable. When the match ended, a portion of home supporters spilled onto the playing field. Pitch invasions are not unheard of in heated derbies; most are short-lived, pushed back by stewards or cordoned off without major incident. That night, however, the incursion met a heavier response.

Security personnel and police moved to clear the field. Scuffles broke out between some supporters and those tasked with restoring order. In the crush of people on and around the pitch, tempers flared, and the situation escalated from a spectator trespass into a confrontation between many civilians and organized security forces.

The gas that changed everything

International football authorities — FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation among them — have long forbidden the use of chemical crowd-control agents inside stadiums. The reasons are simple and stark: tear gas and similar agents provoke disorientation, choking, and above all panic; in a packed, enclosed venue, panic can become lethal.

Shortly after the pitch incursion, police deployed tear gas and other crowd-control munitions. Video evidence and investigations later showed canisters being fired into enclosed spectator corridors and seating areas, not only at the open field. The gas did not simply push people back onto the pitch; it drifted into stairwells, into the narrow paths that lead off the stands, and into corridors where thousands had nowhere to go but the exits.

Witnesses described sudden choking, eyes burning, and the urgent, animal instinct to get away. For a time, the stadium's design and the police response transformed orderly rows and corridors into channels of flight.

Corridors that became tombs

What followed was terrifyingly simple and inexorable. Thousands of people — many of them young, many teenagers — attempted to leave at once through the available exits. Several exit routes, internal corridors, and stairways were narrow, and some gates or turnstiles were not opened or were inadequate for a rapid mass evacuation. CCTV and phone footage later captured the frantic streams of bodies pushing toward bottlenecks.

When people pile into a confined passage and forward motion halts, the force exerted by the crowd becomes compressive. Victims in the worst-affected areas could not move their chests to breathe. Medical reports and autopsies that followed identified compressive asphyxia and blunt trauma consistent with crush injuries as the predominant causes of death. Within a matter of minutes the rush and choke points produced catastrophic outcomes.

Emergency responders were called, ambulances arrived, and hospitals in Malang and the surrounding region enacted mass-casualty responses. Yet access to the most stricken corridors was hampered by the continuing chaos. In the hours that followed, initial casualty figures rose as more injured were triaged and some succumbed after being transported to medical facilities.

Hospitals full and a country grieving

By the next day the scale of the disaster became clear. Official tallies reported 135 people dead and several hundred injured — contemporary tallies used by authorities and widely reported exceeded 500 injured. Many of the deceased were adolescents. Families gathered at hospital wards, identification processes began in difficult conditions, and the city of Malang entered a state of stunned mourning.

The domestic football season halted. Liga 1 was suspended as the league operator, clubs, and government officials sought to assess how a sporting evening had become a mass-casualty event. Funerals and memorials multiplied, while public anger turned toward questions of responsibility: Who had ordered the use of tear gas? Why had exits and stewarding failed? Who controlled the operation inside the stadium that night?

Investigators following the footage

One of the lasting features of this tragedy was the volume of audiovisual evidence. Stadium CCTV, dozens of mobile-phone videos and photographs from spectators, and audio of communications between officers and stewards became the bones around which investigators could build a timeline.

Multiple inquiries were launched: internal police reviews, criminal investigations by prosecutors, independent fact-finding teams convened by government and parliamentary bodies, and examinations by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM). Investigators focused on the trajectory of canisters, the locations where chemical agents landed, the timing of police deployments, the crowd movements in corridors, and the nature of stadium egress.

From the footage, a convergent conclusion emerged: the deployment of tear gas into enclosed spectator areas—contravening international guidance—precipitated a panic that turned circulation spaces into fatal bottlenecks. Command decisions, crowd management failures, and structural shortcomings were all implicated.

Accountability, trials, and institutional reckoning

The legal and disciplinary aftermath began quickly. Prosecutors named and indicted several police officers and officials in connection with the operational decisions that night. Disciplinary measures and personnel changes followed in regional police commands. The football federation and league operator faced criticism for oversight failures and suspended activities while safety reviews proceeded.

Investigations continued to parse lines of command: who made tactical decisions, who authorised the use of specific crowd-control measures, and how command-and-control communications were handled during the crisis. Many questions remained subject to ongoing judicial process — the chain of responsibility and the ultimate legal outcomes were, at last public updates, still being resolved.

Beyond criminal accountability, the disaster forced institutional introspection. The national government ordered reviews of stadium safety infrastructure; regulators reiterated bans on chemical agents in stadiums and demanded better compliance with international standards. Independent fact-finding panels and expert recommendations focused on practical reforms: increasing egress capacity, ensuring gates and turnstiles remain operable in emergencies, improving steward training, clarifying policing doctrine for events, and investing in emergency medical access.

The cost measured in lives and in law

The arithmetic of loss was stark and public. One hundred thirty-five dead; more than five hundred injured; grieving families, dozens of funerals, and a community marked by trauma. The economic costs — suspended leagues, lost match-day revenues, and the reputational damage to clubs and governing bodies — were real but secondary in the public reckoning to human loss.

In the months following the disaster, international bodies and domestic authorities repeated the central lesson: tear gas has no place inside crowded stadiums. The Kanjuruhan case amplified a long-standing argument among safety experts that policing at sporting events requires clear civilian oversight, stringent adherence to international safety standards, and infrastructure that anticipates large-scale movement rather than relying on last-minute crowd control.

What the footage, forensics, and inquiry left behind

For investigators, the evidence assembled a sober narrative. Forensic pathology corroborated eyewitness accounts: most victims died of compressive asphyxia. Video analysis showed canisters landing in spectator corridors. Testimony and operational logs revealed confusion in command decisions and gaps in stewarding and stadium management. The disaster was not a single failure but a cascade: a pitch invasion prompted a policing response; that response included tear gas use inside enclosed spaces; the gas provoked panic; inadequate egress and crowd management turned panic into a deadly crush.

The event also exposed systemic weaknesses — in planning, in training, and in the institutional culture governing how police engage with sporting crowds. Those weaknesses, investigators and reformers argued, were as crucial to address as individual culpability.

A quiet stadium, a restless demand for reform

Months after the tragedy, the empty concourses and unused seating at Kanjuruhan carried a mute testimony to what had occurred. Stadium managers, football authorities, and national institutions faced a new intensity of scrutiny: not only to assign blame but to prevent recurrence. Some reforms were set in motion — stricter enforcement of bans on chemical agents at sporting events, reviews of stadium certification and egress standards, and calls for civilian oversight over policing decisions at mass events.

Legal processes continued to run their course. Families sought compensation and answers. The national conversation broadened beyond football: it touched on how public order is managed in crowded civilian spaces, how emergency planning is enforced, and how institutions facing public scrutiny must change.

What remains with us

The Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster is measured in names, faces, and unfinished investigations. It is a cautionary tale about the speed with which order can collapse in a tightly packed environment and about how a single tactical choice can multiply into tragedy. The forensic conclusions were stark: the use of tear gas inside crowded, enclosed areas precipitated panic that, against the backdrop of narrow exits and insufficient crowd management, produced deadly crushing.

For the survivors and the families of the dead, the consequences are enduring. For the institutions involved — football governing bodies, local and national police, stadium operators — the event demanded more than questions; it required structural changes, legal reckoning, and an insistence that safety protocols be codified, enforced, and transparent.

On that night in Malang, the sound of cheering gave way to a scream for help that stretched across corridors. The aftermath has been a long, public experiment in learning from failure — costly, painful, and, for many, far from complete.