A South Korean court on Wednesday found three former police officers guilty of destroying internal files and other evidence in a cover-up after a 2022 Halloween mob riot in the capital Seoul that killed nearly 160 people. . Deaths (number)
The main cause of the high death toll was the failure of the government’s disaster planning and emergency response. More than 20 government and law enforcement officials were indicted.
The Seoul Western District Court sentenced former Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency intelligence officer Park Sung-min to 18 months in prison for instructing his subordinates to delete internal documents after the clash. Among them was a report showing how police ignored warnings about possible crowd-related accidents in Itaewon’s red-light district.
South Korea claims North Korean hackers compromised presidential staff’s personal emails
Kim Jin-ho, a former intelligence officer at Seoul’s Yongsan-gu Police Station, also received a one-year suspended sentence on a similar charge. Kwang Yong-seok, a junior officer at Yongsan Police Station, was found guilty of destroying files on Kim’s instructions and received a four-month suspended sentence.
Hong Ik-pyo, center representative of the Democratic Party of Korea, speaks at a rally protesting the government’s response to the 2022 Itaewon crowd crushing accident held in front of the National Assembly building in Seoul, South Korea on February 1. 1st, 2024. (Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Civil society groups representing the victims’ families issued a statement welcoming the verdict, saying it was a “failure to anticipate and prepare for the large crowds leading up to the tragedy, and for concealing and downplaying information about the tragedy. “We have acknowledged the criminal responsibility of the public servant.” After that happened. ”
The group also criticized South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol’s veto last month of a bill passed by the opposition-controlled National Assembly to appoint a special investigator to lead an independent investigation into the accident. . After a 74-day investigation into the crowd-pusher incident, a special investigation team led by the National Police Agency found that Yongsan-gu police and city authorities took effective crowd control measures despite the large crowds expected. I concluded that it was not possible to plan.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Seoul police deployed 137 officers to Itaewon on the day of the clash, even though a crowd of more than 100,000 people was expected.
Police also ignored hotline calls from pedestrians warning of growing crowds before the surge became deadly. Authorities also failed to respond before people began to be crushed in an alley near the Hamilton Hotel, failing to establish control of the scene and allow emergency workers to reach the injured in time.
Some experts have called the crash a “man-made disaster” and have called for significant measures, including adding police and civil servants to monitor bottleneck points, reinforcing one-way pedestrian lanes and closing narrow passageways. He said the incident could have been prevented with simple measures.
