Three Policemen Convicted and Sentenced for Cover Up of Itaewon Crowd Crush Tragedy

The cover up is what caused these senior police officials to be convicted of a crime, not the incompetence that contributed to the Itaewon crowd crush disaster:

A South Korean court on Wednesday convicted three former police officers of destroying internal files and other evidence in an attempted cover-up after a Halloween crowd crush that killed nearly 160 people in the capital, Seoul, in 2022. They were the first convictions over the deaths. The high death toll was largely blamed on official failures in disaster planning and a botched emergency response. More than 20 government and police officials were indicted.

The Seoul Western District Court sentenced Park Seong-min, a former senior intelligence officer at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, to 18 months in prison on charges that he ordered subordinates to erase internal documents after the crush. Those included reports showing how police ignored warnings about possible crowd-related accidents in the nightlife district of Itaewon. Kim Jin-ho, a former intelligence officer at Seoul’s Yongsan district police station, received a suspended one-year sentence on similar charges. Kwang Yeong-seok, a lower-ranking officer at the Yongsan station, received a four-month deferred sentence after being found guilty of destroying files under Kim’s instruction.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but what continues to amaze me about this Itaewon tragedy is that there is a police station right across the street from the Hamilton Hotel where the disaster happened. The police received warnings for hours of the dangerous crowds in the area and nothing was done by the police personnel in the station right across the street.