A Seoul court sentenced a former district police chief in connection with suppressing crowds during Halloween in 2022

A plaque marks the October 29 Avenue of Remembrance in Seoul’s Itaewon nightclub district on October 28, 2023, a year after a Halloween crowd crush killed 159 people. A month before the two-year anniversary of the tragedy, a Seoul court sentenced Lee Im-jae, then police chief of the affected district, to three years in prison in connection with the crushing of the crowd. File photo: Thomas Maresca/UPI | License photo

Sept. 30 (UPI) — On Monday, a court in Seoul sentenced a former district police chief to three years in prison without work in connection with the tragic crowd in the city during the 2022 Halloween weekend that killed 159 people.

The Seoul Western District Court ruled that 54-year-old Lee Im-jae, then head of the Yongsan police station, failed to take security measures, leading to the largest crowd crush in South Korean history, Yonhap reports.

“It was either foreseeable or could have been foreseen that a large crowd of people gathered in a sloping street in Itaewon for Halloween in 2022 was likely to pose a serious threat to bodies from pedestrians pushing and pushing each other,” the court said. news agency.

Itaewon is one of Seoul’s trendy nightlife districts, popular with locals from all over the world. On the night of October 29, 2022, as tens of thousands of people were there celebrating Halloween, merry-makers were pushed down a 10-foot-wide driveway near the famous Hamilton Hotel, crushing the crowd.

Most of the victims were in their 20s and 30s. Several of them were not Koreans.

On October 31, 2022, mourners visit Seoul’s Itaewon nightlife district, where a growing Halloween crowd killed at least 154 people and injured 149 others on Friday night. Photo: Thomas Maresca/UPI | License photo

On Monday, the court ruled that Lee failed to implement a safety plan that would have avoided the foreseeable tragedy.

In a separate ruling issued Monday by the same court, Park Hee-young, bureau chief Yongsan Ward and other district officials charged in connection with the deaths were found not guilty because they were not responsible for writing the security plans.

“Crowd crushing at a large gathering was not considered a disaster under the laws in force at the time, and therefore there was no mandatory law requiring the district office to establish separate safety management plans for unhosted events,” the court ruled, The Korea Herald reported on the case “.

During the trial, the defendants argued that the crowd pressure could not have been predicted, while the prosecutor’s office argued that they had failed to fulfill their mandate to prevent foreseeable disasters.

UPI has reached out to the Itaewon Disaster Victims’ Families Association for comment.