LONDON--Chancellor Angela Merkel attended a memorial service on Saturday for the 21 people killed in a stampede at the Love Parade techno music festival as pressure grew on the local mayor, her party ally, to resign. "The love parade turned into a dance of death," Nikolaus Schneider, head of the Protestant church in Germany, told 550 mourners in the Salvator Church at the memorial which was broadcast live on four national television networks. Twenty-one people, aged 20 to 40, were killed and more than 500 injured when hordes of young people pushed through a tunnel into the techno festival area at a former freight rail yard in Duisburg, a poor western German city of 500,000. Eight foreigners -- from Australia, Bosnia, China, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain -- were among those killed. Merkel interrupted her summer holiday to attend the service but criticism of mayor Adolf Sauerland over the disaster has grown so intense that he opted to stay away. Sauerland, a leader in Merkel's Christian Democrats, has been assailed for ignoring warnings from city planning agencies, police and fire officials. They had warned Duisburg was too small to host the event with a crowd of up to a million people. The mayor said he would not resign and was not to blame. "The pressure on me and my family has been enormous," Sauerland told N24 television in an interview. His family has required police protection. "I'm terribly sorry about what happened. After an event like this it's easy to come out and demand someone's head. "There were mistakes made but I'm sure I can help clear up what happened if I stay in office. Answers will be coming." Flags across Germany were lowered to half-mast on government buildings. At the ceremony rescuers lit candles for the victims. Afterwards about 2,000 mourners and rescuers marched through Duisburg from the rail station to the festival grounds.
