A man in his 50s was arrested by police on charges of posting more than 3,000 online messages insulting victims and bereaved families related to the Sewol ferry disaster, the deadly crowd crush in the nightlife district of Itaewon, and Jeju Air incidents.
The National Office of Investigation (NOI) of the Korean National Police Agency said on the 31st that a warrant for the detention of a man in his 50s, identified only by the surname A and suspected of defamation and insult, was issued the previous day.
According to police, from 2022 over four years, A is suspected of repeatedly posting false claims related to the Sewol ferry disaster and defamatory posts targeting bereaved families on major domestic communities and platforms.
Police said their investigation found A had written numerous posts containing false claims such as "The Sewol ferry was a nationwide scam," "The passenger plane crash was a corpse-selling scam," and "The Itaewon accident was corpse play," and uploaded them to the internet.
Bereaved families said they suffered severe psychological trauma and humiliation from posts denying the disaster itself, and they were reported to have complained of the pain of secondary victimization. Police believe A repeatedly spread the phrase "the disaster was fabricated" alongside images from the time of the disaster, fomenting hatred and distrust toward the bereaved families.
This case is the third instance of a perpetrator being detained since the Korean National Police Agency's Secondary Harm Crime Investigation Division was launched in July last year at the direction of President Lee Jae-myung.
After the Secondary Harm Crime Investigation Division was established, in January a man in his 60s suspected of repeatedly posting false messages online related to the deadly crowd crush in the nightlife district of Itaewon was the first to be detained. The second was in April, when a man in his 50s suspected of posting false defamatory content targeting victims and bereaved families of the Sewol ferry disaster and the deadly crowd crush in the nightlife district of Itaewon was detained by police. In all cases, charges of insult and defamation were applied.
Park Woo-hyun, head of cyber investigation review at the Korean National Police Agency, said, "Spreading false information using social disasters is a serious crime beyond the bounds of freedom of expression," adding that authorities will track down and hold accountable online posts that incite hate and confusion to the end.