South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol has become the country’s first sitting president to be arrested, ending a weeks-long standoff between investigators and his presidential security team.
Yoon, whose failed attempt to impose martial law plunged the country into turmoil and saw him impeached by parliament, is being investigated on charges of insurrection.
He is, however, still technically the president as a constitutional court has to decide whether his impeachment is valid.
Investigators used ladders and wirecutters in the freezing cold to get to Yoon, whose Presidential Security Service (PSS) personnel had erected barricades in a bid to thwart his arrest.
The CIO had previously attempted to arrest him on 3 January but they were blocked by buses and barbed wire.
But just before dawn on Wednesday, a team of investigators arrived, this time armed with ladders to bypass bus barricades and pliers to cut through barbed wire fences.
Other members of the team – which numbered around 1,000 officers – scaled walls and hiked up nearby trails in a bid to reach the presidential residence.
After several hours, authorities announced that Yoon had been arrested.
In a three- minute video released just before his arrest, the 64-year-old leader said he would comply with the investigation against him even though he was against it.
Yoon has consistently maintained that the warrant for his arrest is not legally valid.
The standoff has also pitted two branches of executive power against each other: law enforcement officers, armed with a legal arrest warrant and presidential security staff, who said they were duty bound to protect the suspended president.
BBC
