KARACHI: Solis Festival recently concluded it’s fourth edition in Islamabad but what would have been an otherwise powerful show ended up being a disaster, or so say many people on social media. Numerous first-hand accounts have been pouring on Twitter and Facebook and several festival goers have described their experiences at the show.
The trouble started when hundreds of fake-ticket-holders crashed the show, which resulted in the entire venue becoming overcrowded. Eventually, the VIP stage collapsed due to over-crowding. Scores of festival-goers were injured. Many women have claimed that were groped, spit on, pushed and harassed in various other ways.
The organizers took to Instagram to publish their official statement on the matter. “We chose the venue and our security based on the number of tickets sold and made arrangements based on this. We warned against fake tickets on numerous occasions. However, we underestimated the sheer volume of thousands of “fake tickets” that were being sold illegally. These people were denied entry, but broke our barricades and forced themselves in, climbing on VIP platforms which couldn’t take the weight and destroyed our stage putting everyone’s safety at risk,” they wrote.
“To those that believed in us and came to genuinely enjoy the show, we are deeply sorry that this experience was ruined by others. For you, our true fans, we absolutely could not put your safety and security at risk and had to stop the event. What some of you didn’t see was the further damage these individuals caused after we shut down the event. Crores of damage have set us back even further.”
The show has been indefinitely postponed in Islamabad but the organizers say that they will be back.
