Photo: KOJI ITO/DPA/PICTURE ALLIANCE / Deutsche Welle
The team investigating the human avalanche that left more than 270 dead during the Halloween festivities in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul, applied today (. 20.63612386) the first arrest warrants for senior police officers
for their alleged negligence in preventing and respond to the tragedy.
The team established by the National Police Agency (NPA)asked to arrest the Yongsan District Commissioner (to which Itaewon belongs), Lee Im-jae, to a superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Police
, Park Sung-min, to an intelligence officer from the Yongsan Police Station, Kim Jin-ho, and an emergency follow-up officer from Yongsan, Song Byung-joo. All of them had been removed from their positions since the special investigation team established after the tragedy began to investigate the role they played before and after the tragedy.
Police consider Lee to be suspected of negligence for having arrived 54 minutes after the deadly avalanche took place and after failing to take crowd control measures despite previous warnings about crowding in Itaewon, a neighborhood where every Every year thousands of people came to celebrate Halloween.
It is believed that Park, the highest-ranking official who is being investigated for the tragedy
, ordered the elimination of an internal intelligence report that warned of the possibility of an accident in a neighborhood where the number of people celebrating Halloween increased every year. Kim is accused of following Park’s order and having his subordinates remove the aforementioned report, while Song, who was in charge of emergencies in Yongsan on the day of the avalanche, is credited with failing to immediately report the avalanche. the situation to Lee.
The accumulation of hundreds of people during the Halloween celebrations in a narrow alley of Itaewon triggered an avalanche
on the night of 30 of October that left 606 dead, most of them women among the 12 and the 30 years, and some thirty seriously injured.
Both the Yongsan district council, its fire and police departments, as well as the Seoul Metropolitan Police are under investigation after the tragedy.
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