The South Korean Supreme Court yesterday upheld a murder conviction and life sentence for the captain in the Sewol ferry disaster, saying he had effectively drowned more than 300 passengers to save himself.
The Sewol was carrying 476 people when it went down off the southwest island of Jindo on April 16 last year. Of the 304 who died, 250 were pupils from the same high school.
The tragedy shocked and enraged the country as it became clear that it was almost entirely man-made — the result of an illegal redesign, an overloaded cargo bay, an inexperienced crew and an unhealthy nexus between operators and state regulators.
Captain Lee Jun-seok and his crew were vilified, especially after video footage emerged showing them escaping the vessel while hundreds were trapped onboard.
“Captain Lee made it impossible for passengers to leave the ship on their own by escaping from the ship first without issuing an evacuation order,” Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae said as he read out the ruling.
“This is equivalent to pushing passengers into water and letting them drown,” Yang said.
In his first trial a year ago, Lee, now 70 years old, had been acquitted of homicide charges and convicted instead of gross negligence.
That decision was overturned on appeal in April and replaced by the murder verdict and a life sentence — the ruling upheld by the apex court yesterday.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
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LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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