Families weep as police officers jailed in first convictions over Korea’s Halloween stampede

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A South Korean court has sentenced the former chief of a local police station to three years in prison for his failure to prevent the 2022 Halloween crowd crush in Itaewon that killed 159 people.

Lee Im-jae is the first senior police official of Seoul’s local Yongsan police station, which oversees safety in Itaewon, to be convicted for the tragedy, which the Seoul Western District Court deemed a “man-made disaster”.

Two other former police officials received lesser sentences. The court gave one officer a two-year prison sentence and handed a third a suspended two-year term. The three officers were found guilty of professional negligence leading to death.

Lee had failed to prepare for a mass Halloween gathering whose dangers he should have foreseen, thus creating the conditions for the Itaewon tragedy, the court said in a statement.

Outside the court, family members of the victims were seen crying after the sentencing.

The court said: “As the Yongsan Police Station was in charge of security for Yongsan District and therefore responsible on the day of the incident both for maintaining order on Halloween Day and preparing for large-scale demonstrations and assemblies that were scheduled to occur under their jurisdiction, they appear to have faced some limitations in terms of effectively operating their forces.”

The court also concluded that Lee had “failed to properly attend to his radio or was otherwise negligent”.

The victims, primarily in their twenties and thirties, were attending Halloween celebrations when a massive 100,000-plus crowd of revellers flocked to Itaewon, a metropolis known for its nightlife.

By 10.20pm local time, crowds had surged to unsafe numbers and the situation turned dire when people on a slope fell over, leading to a crush that trapped hundreds. Witnesses said the crowd surge caused “a hell-like” chaos as people fell on each other “like dominos”.

Following the tragedy, families demanded accountability from senior officials, including interior minister Lee Sang-min, though a parliamentary vote to impeach him was blocked by the constitutional court.

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The crowd crush, one of South Korea’s largest peacetime disasters, triggered widespread national grief.

Lee’s lawyer told Yonhap news agency before the ruling that it was “excessively harsh” to expect his client to have prepared for an unforeseeable event.

The police officers and prosecutors have the option to appeal the decision.

While Lee was held accountable for failing to foresee and prepare for the gathering, other district officials, including Park Hee-young, who was the head of the Yongsan ward office, were acquitted. The court also acquitted three other ward officials besides Mr Park, saying that a ward office lacked the legal authority to control or disperse a crowd.

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Prosecutors had sought seven-year prison sentences for both Mr Park and Lee.

The acquittal of Mr Park and the ward officials was met with criticism from bereaved family members. “Does this make sense? We can’t really accept this,” Lee Jeong-min, a representative of the families was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

In a statement issued after the court sentencing, the group comprising family members of the Halloween crush victims, called 10.29 Itaewon Disaster Bereaved Families, insisted that the “large-scale tragedy would not have occurred if [the district office] had requested police security to control congestion, or if officials with the office had at least taken action to control crowds, including passage at intersections within the side streets”.

The statement added: “The court’s conclusion that there was ‘nothing the Yongsan District Office could have done’ is a case of succumbing to formal legal logic and using it as a basis for exonerating the defendants for their incompetence.”

Lee Jeong-min, whose daughter Lee Ju-yeong was among those who lost their lives, told The Hankyoreh Shinmun: “Where is the judicial system in this country?”

Last year, the Seoul metropolitan government introduced a range of new measures “to ensure a safe Halloween”, including the implementation of a new CCTV system to monitor crowd sizes.

In January this year, Seoul’s police chief, Kim Kwang-ho, was also charged with negligence related to the crowd crush.