South Korean investigators seeking to arrest the impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, have clashed with his supporters as they launched a fresh attempt to execute an arrest warrant over insurrection accusations related to his 3 December declaration of martial law.
Video footage showed investigating officers from the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) trying to push through a crowd of Yoon’s supporters gathered outside his hillside villa in Seoul, where he has been holed up for weeks behind barbed wire and a small army of personal security.
The investigating officials said they would detain anyone who tried to block their bid to execute a new warrant, Yonhap news agency reported.
Streets around the compound were sealed off with police buses and thousands of officers were present.
But crowds of Yoon supporters, most of them elderly, were gathered near the residence gates and around makeshift stages hosting speeches describing the arrest warrant “fake” and calling for the arrest of opposition leader Lee Jae-myung.
Braving the freezing early morning, many held up red light sticks and banners in both Korean and English, including “Stop the steal” and “CCP out”, embracing unfounded claims of electoral manipulation and alleged Chinese interference – despite the fact that no major election observers or courts have raised concerns about last April’s parliamentary vote that saw the opposition secure a decisive victory.
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.
A joint team of the CIO and police have since secured a new warrant and massed as many as 1,000 personnel for Wednesday’s attempt to detain Yoon, according to local media reports.
They have also threatened to detain any guards who obstructed the sitting leader’s arrest.
More details soon…
