9 More Police Officers and Government Officials Face Charges Related to Itaewon Crowd Crush Disaster

Even more police officers and other officials are being charged for not doing their jobs properly the night of the Itaewon crowd crush disaster:

A total of nine police officers and government officials were additionally booked Wednesday for an investigation into the bungled response to the crowd crush in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood, police said.

Among those on the list are Park Sung-min, a superintendent general, and Song Byung-joo, a former emergency monitoring officer at Yongsan Police Station, as well as four other intelligence officers, they said. 

Park is under suspicion of ordering the deletion of an internal intelligence report giving prior warnings of a possible safety accident during the Halloween period in a suspected attempt to cover up inaction. A superintendent general is the fourth-highest rank in the police.

Also on Wednesday, Song, who was in charge of the police’s 112 emergency hotline in Yongsan Ward covering the Itaewon district, was quizzed by a special investigation team earlier in the day on whether he had promptly reported the situation to Lee Im-jae, who formerly headed the station.

Lee earlier testified during a parliamentary audit that he learned of the accident at around 11 p.m., around 45 minutes after the incident first erupted, claiming the emergency hotline chief had earlier reported to him that nothing unusual was going on.

Yonhap

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