South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol faces fresh arrest attempt
Share:
Police and officials move to detain impeached president after previous failure to execute warrant. South Korean authorities investigating the impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, have launched a fresh attempt to execute an arrest warrant over insurrection accusations related to his 3 December declaration of martial law.
Early on Wednesday, vehicles from the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) arrived in front of Yoon’s hill-side villa in Seoul, where he has been holed up for weeks. Approximately 6,500 supporters of Yoon were gathered at the residence and some ruling party lawmakers were forming a human chain to block the execution of the arrest warrant, Yonhap news agency said.
The investigating officials said they would detain anyone who tried to block their bid to execute a new warrant, Yonhap news agency reported. Yoon’s short-lived power grab left him facing arrest, imprisonment or, at worst, the death penalty. He plunged South Korea into its worst political crisis in decades after sending soldiers to storm parliament, shaking the vibrant east Asian democracy and briefly lurching it back to the dark days of military rule.
If the court-ordered warrant is successfully executed, Yoon would become the first sitting president in South Korean history to be arrested. But a first attempt to arrest Yoon on 3 January failed after a tense hours-long standoff with his presidential guards, who refused to budge when investigators tried to execute their warrant.
