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A South Korean courtroom has sentenced the previous chief of a neighborhood police station to a few years in jail for his failure to stop the 2022 Halloween crowd crush in Itaewon that killed 159 folks.
Lee Im-jae is the primary senior police official of Seoul’s native Yongsan police station, which oversees security in Itaewon, to be convicted for the tragedy, which the Seoul Western District Court docket deemed a “man-made catastrophe”.
Two different former police officers obtained lesser sentences. The courtroom gave one officer a two-year jail sentence and handed a 3rd a suspended two-year time period. The three officers have been discovered responsible {of professional} negligence resulting in dying.
Lee had failed to arrange for a mass Halloween gathering whose risks he ought to have foreseen, thus creating the situations for the Itaewon tragedy, the courtroom stated in a press release.
Exterior the courtroom, members of the family of the victims have been seen crying after the sentencing.
The courtroom stated: “Because the Yongsan Police Station was in command of safety for Yongsan District and subsequently accountable on the day of the incident each for sustaining order on Halloween Day and making ready for large-scale demonstrations and assemblies that have been scheduled to happen beneath their jurisdiction, they seem to have confronted some limitations by way of successfully working their forces.”
The courtroom additionally concluded that Lee had “didn’t correctly attend to his radio or was in any other case negligent”.
The victims, primarily of their twenties and thirties, have been attending Halloween celebrations when a large 100,000-plus crowd of revellers flocked to Itaewon, a metropolis identified for its nightlife.
By 10.20pm native time, crowds had surged to unsafe numbers and the state of affairs turned dire when folks on a slope fell over, resulting in a crush that trapped tons of. Witnesses stated the group surge triggered “a hell-like” chaos as folks fell on one another “like dominos”.
Following the tragedy, households demanded accountability from senior officers, together with inside minister Lee Sang-min, although a parliamentary vote to question him was blocked by the constitutional courtroom.
The gang crush, one in all South Korea’s largest peacetime disasters, triggered widespread nationwide grief.
Lee’s lawyer instructed Yonhap information company earlier than the ruling that it was “excessively harsh” to count on his shopper to have ready for an unforeseeable occasion.
The cops and prosecutors have the choice to attraction the choice.
Whereas Lee was held accountable for failing to foresee and put together for the gathering, different district officers, together with Park Hee-young, who was the pinnacle of the Yongsan ward workplace, have been acquitted. The courtroom additionally acquitted three different ward officers in addition to Mr Park, saying {that a} ward workplace lacked the authorized authority to manage or disperse a crowd.
Prosecutors had sought seven-year jail sentences for each Mr Park and Lee.
The acquittal of Mr Park and the ward officers was met with criticism from bereaved members of the family. “Does this make sense? We will’t actually settle for this,” Lee Jeong-min, a consultant of the households was quoted as saying by the Related Press.
In a press release issued after the courtroom sentencing, the group comprising members of the family of the Halloween crush victims, known as 10.29 Itaewon Catastrophe Bereaved Households, insisted that the “large-scale tragedy wouldn’t have occurred if [the district office] had requested police safety to manage congestion, or if officers with the workplace had not less than taken motion to manage crowds, together with passage at intersections throughout the facet streets”.
The assertion added: “The courtroom’s conclusion that there was ‘nothing the Yongsan District Workplace might have completed’ is a case of succumbing to formal authorized logic and utilizing it as a foundation for exonerating the defendants for his or her incompetence.”
Lee Jeong-min, whose daughter Lee Ju-yeong was amongst those that misplaced their lives, instructed The Hankyoreh Shinmun: “The place is the judicial system on this nation?”
Final yr, the Seoul metropolitan authorities launched a spread of recent measures “to make sure a secure Halloween”, together with the implementation of a brand new CCTV system to observe crowd sizes.
In January this yr, Seoul’s police chief, Kim Kwang-ho, was additionally charged with negligence associated to the group crush.
