The mayor of the German city of Duisburg resisted yesterday calls to quit after a panicked stampede at the Love Parade music festival left 19 people dead and more than 500 injured.

Authorities had reportedly been warned the western industrial city was too small to host one of Europe’s biggest techno music events, while security arrangements have been slammed as being woefully inadequate.

“If the city is guilty of anything then we will assume responsibility,” Mayor Adolf Sauerland said in a statement. “There are probing and urgent questions that must be answered.”

He added: “I can understand that there are calls for me to resign. But first of all we have to take the time to investigate these awful events.”

Police said that the 11 women and eight men died on Saturday as they scrambled to escape from a crush in a narrow, 100-metre tunnel that served as the only entrance to the festival grounds.

The dead, crushed against the tunnel walls or trampled underfoot, were aged between 20 and 40 and included seven foreigners, from Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, China, Bosnia and Spain.

Yesterday prosecutors raised the total number of injured at 511, 42 of whom were still in hospital, from a previous estimate of more than 340. One person remained in a critical condition.

Amateur footage from Saturday showed lifeless bodies being passed over the heads of those frantically trying to escape from a huge mass of crowded and panicking people.

Meanwhile, police in the Swiss city of Zurich yesterday ordered a review of safety for the city’s Street Parade music festival after the Love Parade tragedy.

City police spokesman Robert Soos told a local radio station that the move before the event on August 14, which attracts several hundred thousand people each year, would help ensure that arrangements could be improved to their utmost.