It will be interesting to see how this trial turns out that begins on May 23rd with both former President Park and her alleged partner in corruption Choi Soon-sil standing trial together:
Choi Soon-sil
The charges mostly center on an extortion racket Park and Choi allegedly ran out of Cheong Wa Dae by using two dubious nonprofits Choi set up and staffed with her drinking buddies.
The trial proper starts on May 23 and will bring the two women together for the first time since their schemes started to unravel last autumn and Choi fled abroad. The court rejected a request by Choi to be tried separately.
Choi’s lawyer Lee Kyung-jae, in a typically florid submission, said his client feels “unbearable shame” at having to stand trial next to Park, whom she respected for many years. Lee added the prospect is tantamount to the pain of “gouging out her own eyes.” [Chosun Ilbo]
Another creepy ajushi in the Seoul diplomatic corps is in trouble:
A South Korean diplomat has been convicted of taking indecent photos of women.
Seoul Western District Court fined the lawyer-turned-diplomat, 38, identified only as Kim, 70 million won and ordered him to take a 40-hour education program on sexual crimes.
He was apprehended on Aug. 5 last year for taking photos up the skirt of a woman on a bus. Police later confirmed that he had used his smartphone to take photos up women’s skirts 16 times between April 2015 and August last year. One photo was taken in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs lobby in Seoul. [Korea Times]
An Australian, whose identity is unknown, has been arrested for defacing a subway car, according to Suseo Police Station Sunday.
According to police, the man, 22, and his girlfriend arrived on Mar. 27, and stayed at a hotel near Hongik University.
The man broke into Gangnam Subway Depot and drew graffiti on a subway car on Apr. 1, after being told wrongly he could do this.
He left for Japan the next day, but was arrested on Sunday after stopping at Incheon International Airport for a flight back to Australia. [Korea Times]
You would think the police in Seoul would have better things to do instead of arresting this guy for taking a banner down off of his home:
Police have booked an American man, 64, who works as a part-time English instructor at Hongik University, for allegedly vandalizing a presidential campaign poster.
Under Korean election law, unlawfully removing or vandalizing a political campaign poster can lead to a two-year jail term or a fine of 4 million won ($ 3,500).
Mapo Police Station said on Monday the man allegedly tried to remove a poster from the side of his house on Apr. 21. His neighbors tried to stop him but he repeatedly said “my home” and continued to dismantle the poster before being arrested.
It is unclear whether the neighbors explained clearly to the suspect that removing an election poster is against the law. The man is known to have told police he did not know it was unlawful. [Korea Times]
There is probably more to this story, but on the surface it seems if someone puts a banner on your house you should be able to take it down if you don’t want it there.
Here is something you don’t see happen very often in South Korea, a bank robbery:
This photo, provided by an anonymous citizen, shows the suspect Kim minutes before he carries out a bank heist in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang Province, southeast of Seoul, on April 20, 2017. (Yonhap)
Police said Saturday it has arrested a suspect in an armed bank robbery that took place in the country’s southeastern provincial county two days earlier.
The Gyeongsan Police Station in North Gyeongsang Province said it caught a 43-year-old man, identified only by his last name Kim, at a parking lot of a large accommodation facility in Danyang, North Chungcheong Province, at around 6:47 p.m.
Police had suspected the robber may be a foreigner as one of the bank employees claimed he had a poor Korean accent, but it turned out that he was a native.
Kim is suspected of robbing a branch of the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, also known as Nonghyup, in a county in Gyeongsan early Thursday, threatening the employees at gunpoint and fleeing the scene on a bicycle with some 15.6 million won (US$13,700) in cash, all of which took him only four minutes.
During the heist, he apparently fired one shot from what the police believe to be a homemade gun, but no one was hurt as it was aimed at the wall. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but as expected the man was tracked down by piecing together camera footage from neighborhood cc cameras.
Just in case anyone has any ideas about trying something like this you may want to read below because you can be held legally accountable:
A Korean-American woman is suing her ex-boyfriend for secretly dosing her with birth control pills.
The woman, 36, surnamed Hyo, filed a compensation suit for $5 million to her American ex-boyfriend, a neuroradiology doctor, for allegedly feeding her “Plan B One-Step” without her knowledge, according to The New York Post.
Hyo confronted her ex-boyfriend last May when she found an empty birth control pill box inside a trash bin.
“I knew you would not consent to taking birth control pills voluntarily, so I resorted to using this method,” the man allegedly confessed after admitting that he had been dissolving the pills in her juice.
The two broke up after the incident.
Plan B One Step is a birth control pill that can prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex and can be bought only with a doctor-signed prescription. [Korea Times]
I would not want to be the commander for the unit these idiots serve in that kept an underage prostitute in the on-post dormitories and fed her dining facility food:
Two enlisted airmen assigned to Dover Air Force Base are being held on federal charges they sexually abused a runaway teen girl.
The men, identified as Airman 1st Class Dalian Washington, 25, of Philadelphia, and Airman 1st Class Akeem Beazer, 21, of Pompano Beach, Fla., were arrested March 31, said Kimberlynn Reeves, spokeswoman for acting US Attorney David Weiss.
Both men are charged with sexual abuse of a minor, while Washington also faces a single count of sex trafficking of a child.
According to the criminal complaint against both men, the case came to light in March when the girl told a social worker that beginning when she was 15 years old and continuing after her 16th birthday, she had stayed at Dover AFB and had sexual relations with Air Force personnel while there.
This admission prompted an investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Delaware State Police.
The DSP detective was familiar with the girl, who allegedly had a troubled home life and often ran away from home. [Dover Post]
You can read the rest at the link, but this girl was being pimped out of the DMV of all places.
I wonder how long she has been getting away with this?:
This provided image, taken from CCTV footage, shows a 20-year-old woman (in red circle) stealing two bracelets at a jeweler’s shop in the central city of Cheongju on April 1, 2017. (Yonhap)
Police have booked a 20-year-old woman for allegedly stealing two gold bracelets and hiding them in her buttocks at a jeweler’s shop in central South Korea earlier this month, they said Wednesday.
The Heungdeok Police Station in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, said the woman, along with her 21-year-old friend, visited the shop on April 1 and browsed the bracelets on display. She repeatedly put her hand into her pants while the other woman was talking to an employee over the purchase of a ring.
According to the police, the shopowner found that two bracelets, worth 980,000 won (about US$856), were gone. The woman was later spotted picking them up in CCTV footage.
She denied the allegations and demanded that the shop call the police to determine whether she stole them, saying that she wore a pair of leggings and had nowhere to hide them.
Two female police officers arrived at the shop and conducted a strip search in a bathroom near the shop after getting the suspect’s consent, eventually obtaining her confession that she had hidden them in her buttocks. [Yonhap]
You would think this guy would find a more secure location to hide this much money. He is lucky the students who found the money did not just walk away with it. Considering he is now under arrest maybe it would have been better for him:
(Left) A money envelope containing bills in a locker at Sungkyunkwan University on March 7. (Right) Inside is 200 million won (177,000 dollar) in cash. [SUWON JUNGBU POLICE PRECINCT]An envelope containing a bundle of bills amounting to 200 million won ($177,000) was found in a student locker at Sungkyunkwan University campus in Suwon, Gyeonggi.
The owner happens to be a professor of Sungkyunkwan University and husband to attorney, Choi Yu-jeong, who was arrested last year for her involvement in corruption.
The life science student association at the Sungkyunkwan University Natural Sciences campus in Suwon was undergoing spring cleaning on March 7 when they discovered a locked locker. Unable to identify the owner, they forced open the locker.
Inside they found a yellow envelope containing 1,800 50,000 won bills and 1,000 100 dollar bills. The student association immediately notified the school and reported this to the police.
The Suwon police poured through footage from the CCTV cameras on campus. However, as there were no CCTV cameras covering the lockers, the investigation did not progress. The students said the locker had been locked since August.
Fortunately, police were able to spot a man, later identified as a Sungkyunkwan University professor, moving towards the student lockers with a bag on Feb. 16.
The Sungkyunkwan University professor returned to the scene on March 8 to verify whether the money was still safely stashed there. Since there are no faculty offices in the vicinity of the student locker room and the area is generally not visited by professors, this piqued the interest of investigators.
Unluckily for the academic, that day happened to be a day after the student association’s report to the police.
The police found he was the husband of Choi and subsequently searched his office on Tuesday while requesting his presence at the police department. “At the request of my wife, I deposited [the money] at the locker,” he confessed. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Nobody likes bullies, but this reaction to bullying was a bit too extreme:
The Ulsan District Court has jailed a man who raided a middle school with six thugs to threaten teenage girls who bullied his daughter.
The court Tuesday jailed the father for a year and sentenced the gangsters he hired to terms ranging from eight months to a year. They were accused of the crime in 2015.
The convicted man’s daughter allegedly suffered serious distress two years ago because of school bullies.
The man acted after the bullies shared a photo of his daughter’s body parts with classmates without her permission, asking the thugs to “take revenge.”
Later, the father and one of his henchmen broke into the school principal’s office, threatening the principal to assemble the bullies. The five other thugs were waiting at the school’s main gate to intimidate students and staff.
The principal refused to give in, so the men broke into the bullies’ classroom. They forced the alleged bullies to kneel in front of the class and threatened to beat them. [Korea Times]
