SEOUL (TIP): South Korea’s parliament on May 2 approved legislation mandating a new, independent investigation into the 2022 Halloween crush in Seoul that killed 159 people.
The single-chamber National Assembly passed the bill by a 256-0 vote. It will become law after it is signed by President Yoon Suk Yeol and promulgated by his government agency — steps that are considered formalities because the president and his ruling party already agreed on the legislation.
The bill is meant to delve into the root cause of the crush, details about how authorities handled the disaster and who should be blamed for it. It also envisages the creation of a fact-finding committee with nine members that would independently examine the disaster for up to 15 months. Once the committee determines who is responsible and who should face charges, it would report them to the government’s investigation agencies. The agencies would then conclude investigations of the suspects within three months, according to the bill.
The crush, one of the biggest peacetime disasters in South Korea, caused a nationwide outpouring of grief. The victims, who were mostly in their 20s and 30s, had gathered in Seoul’s popular nightlife district of Itaewon for Halloween celebrations. In the aftermath of the tragedy, there was also anger that the government had again ignored safety and regulatory issues despite the lessons learned since the 2014 sinking of the ferry Sewol, which killed 304 people — mostly teenagers on a school trip.
In early 2023, a police special investigation concluded that police and municipal officials failed to formulate effective crowd control steps, despite correctly anticipating a huge number of people in Itaewon. At the time, investigators said police had also ignored hotline calls by pedestrians who warned of swelling crowds before the surge turned deadly.
More than 20 police and other officials have been on trial over the disaster but few top-level officials have been charged or held accountable, prompting bereaved families and opposition lawmakers to call for an independent probe.
President Yoon had previously opposed a new investigation of the disaster. However, during a meeting with liberal opposition leader Lee Jae-myung on Monday, Yoon said he would not oppose it, should some existing disputes be resolved, such as whether the fact-finding committee can request arrest warrants. (AP)
Tag: Seoul
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South Korea’s parliament approves independent investigation of the devastating 2022 Halloween crush
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13 injured in South Korea as a man rams a car onto a sidewalk, stabs pedestrians, police pursue suspect
SEOUL (TIP): A man rammed a car onto a sidewalk August 3 in the South Korean city of Seongnam, then stepped out of the vehicle and began stabbing people at a shopping mall, leaving at least 14 people wounded.
Just hours after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Friday called for “ultra-strong” law enforcement measures in response to that attack, police found themselves chasing the suspect in another stabbing incident at a high school in Daejeon city.
Cho Byeong-tae, an official at the Daejeon metropolitan police department, said the attack at Songchon High School left at least one teacher hurt. He did not identify the victim or provide details about the victim’s health.
At least five people were hurt by the car and nine others were stabbed during Thursday’s attack in Seongnam that occurred in a crowded leisure district near a subway, according to Yoon Sung-hyun, an official from the southern Gyeonggi provincial police department.
Authorities arrested a 22-year-old suspect at the scene and were questioning him. Police did not identify the man or offer any immediate information about a potential motive.
According to Park Gyeong-won, an official at Gyeonggi’s Bundang district police station, the suspect during police interviews talked incoherently and said he was being stalked by an unspecified source. The suspect’s family told police he had a history of mental illness. While the suspect had purchased the two knives he used in the stabbings from a different shopping mall on Wednesday, there isn’t clear evidence he planned the attacks in advance, Park said. The attack was South Korea’s second mass stabbing attack in a month, Last month, a knife-wielding man stabbed at least four pedestrians on a street in the capital, Seoul, killing one person.
Yoon called for closer monitoring of social media to detect threats, deploying more law enforcement officers for prevention and equipping them with better suppression gear, according to Seoul’s presidential office.
An official at Gyeonggi’s provincial fire department, Ha Dong-geun, said at least two of those who were wounded after the suspect drove the car onto the sidewalk were hospitalized in critical condition. Among the nine who were stabbed, eight were being treated for injuries seen as serious. Photos from the scene showed forensic units examining the halls of the AK Plaza, where the stabbings took place. A white Kia hatchback with a broken front window and ruptured front tire could be seen on a sidewalk near the subway station.
South Korea’s Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper published a video on its website that it said was sent by a witness. The footage showed a man wearing sunglasses and a black hoodie walking up the mall’s escalator with an object in his hand. (PTI) -
One dead, three injured in Seoul stabbing rampage
SEOUL (TIP): One person was killed and three more wounded when a man went on a “stabbing rampage” near a subway station in the South Korean capital Seoul on July 21, police told AFP.
The attack took place near the Sillim subway station in southwest Seoul, police said, adding that the suspect had been detained by officers at the scene. “The suspect is a man in his 30s and he did not look intoxicated. We are questioning him as to the motive of his crime,” they said.
The Yonhap news agency reported that the attack happened near Exit 4 of the station at 2:07 pm (0507 GMT).
Video posted on local television station YTN’s YouTube channel showed orange-vested emergency responders running towards the incident carrying stretchers.
Police had cordoned off the area with yellow tape, the footage showed.
“The man shouted he didn’t want to live any more as he was being apprehended by the police,” YTN reported. Grainy footage on YTN appeared to show police apprehending the suspect, who had sat down on steps and seemed to sit passively as armed police approached him and placed him under arrest.
“People ran into my store, telling me a man with a big knife was stabbing people. We locked the door,” a store owner in the area told YTN. Eyewitnesses said the suspect stabbed a man who was talking on the phone in the back multiple times before running off and attacking more people, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported.
“All four victims are reportedly men,” it added.
‘Low crime rate’
South Korea is typically an extremely safe country, with a murder rate of just 1.3 per 100,000 people in 2021, according to official statistics.
By comparison, America has 7.8 homicide deaths per 100,000 people, according to the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most South Koreans are trained shooters, as all men must perform about two years of mandatory military service.
But the country has strict gun control laws and it is extremely difficult for civilians to obtain firearms, with gun-related crime almost unheard of.
There have been a handful of high-profile stabbing crimes over the last few years.
Earlier this year in the southern city of Busan, a 23-year-old crime drama fanatic stabbed to death a woman she had met online, local media reported.
In March, a 37-year-old woman was accused of injuring three people with a knife on a subway, allegedly after someone called her “ajumma” — a way to refer to a middle-aged woman.
Last year, a man stabbed a former co-worker to death in a subway station after stalking her for years. He was later sentenced to decades in prison.
The rare incident in Seoul quickly began circulating on Korean-language social media. “Don’t come to Sillim now. There is a crazy man on a stabbing rampage. I called the police after seeing a person injured on the ground,” one user with the handle sanong_cos wrote on Twitter.(AFP) -
Kim lays blame at officials for N Korea’s economic failures
Seoul (TIP): North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ripped into the performance of his Cabinet and fired a senior economic official he appointed a month ago, saying they’d failed to come up with new ideas to salvage an economy in decay. The report by state media on Friday comes during the toughest period of Kim’s nine-year rule. The diplomacy he had hoped would lift US-led sanctions over his nuclear program is stalemated, and pandemic border closures and crop-killing natural disasters last year deepened the damage to an economy broken by decades of policy failures. Some analysts say the current challenges may set up conditions for an economic perfect storm in the North that destabilises markets and triggers public panic and unrest.
The current challenges had forced Kim to publicly admit that past economic plans hadn’t succeeded. A new five-year plan to develop the economy was issued during the ruling Workers’ Party congress in January but Kim’s comments during the party’s Central Committee meeting — that ended on Thursday — were rich with frustration with how the plans were being executed so far.
During Thursday’s session, Kim lamented that the Cabinet was failing in its role as the key institution managing the economy, saying it was producing unworkable plans while displaying no “innovative viewpoint and clear tactics”.
He said the Cabinet’s targets for agricultural production this year were set unrealistically high, considering limited supplies in farming materials and other unfavourable conditions. He said the Cabinet’s targets for electricity production was set too low, showing a lack of urgency when shortages could stall work at coal mines and other industries.
“The Cabinet failed to play a leading role in mapping out plans of key economic fields and almost mechanically brought together the numbers drafted by the ministries,” the KCNA paraphrased Kim as saying. The KCNA also said O Su Yong was named as the new director of the Central Committee’s Department of Economic Affairs during this week’s meeting, replacing Kim Tu II who was appointed in January. Kim Jong Un during the January party congress called for reasserting greater state control over the economy, boosting agricultural production and prioritising the development of chemicals and metal industries. He also vowed all-out efforts to bolster his nuclear weapons programme in comments that were seen as an attempt to pressure the new Biden administration.
Sectors such as metal and chemicals would be crucial to North Korean hopes to revitalise industrial production that has been decimated by sanctions and halted imports of factory materials amid the pandemic. However, most experts agree that North Korea’s new development plans aren’t meaningfully different from its previous ones that lacked in substance.
South Korean intelligence officials have said there are also signs that the North is taking dramatic steps to strengthen government control over markets, including suppressing the use of US dollars and other foreign currencies. Such measures, which are apparently aimed at forcing people to exchange their foreign currency savings for the North Korean Won, demonstrate the government’s sense of urgency over its depleting foreign currency reserves, analysts say. AP
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South Korea to dispatch diplomat for Tehran talks after Iran seizes tanker
Seoul (TIP): South Korea is dispatching a delegation to Iran as early as on Tuesday to seek the release of a tanker seized in the Gulf waters by Iranian forces, with a senior diplomat set to go ahead with a planned visit Tehran on Sunday amid tensions over $7 billion in Iranian funds frozen in Korean banks due to US sanctions. A screenshot taken on January 4, 2021, from Refinitiv Eikon shows the location of a South Korean-flagged tanker seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps in Gulf. REFINITIV EIKON via REUTERS
The news of the visits came as Seoul’s Foreign Ministry called in the Iranian ambassador to South Korea for a meeting and urged the early release of the South Korean-flagged tanker and its crew of 20.
It was carrying a cargo of more than 7,000 tonnes of ethanol when it was seized on Monday over what Iranian media said were pollution violations.
The incident comes as Iran shows increasing signs of willingness to assert its claims in the region as US President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office later this month, succeeding Donald Trump. Reuters