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South Korea suspended President Yoon Suk-Yeol after being arrested on Wednesday.
1 / 2Photo: Kim Sung-Min/Yonhap Via AP/TT
South Korea’s arrested ex-president Yoon Suk-Yeol may remain behind bars.
He has been interrogated for over ten hours and is expected to be detained within a few days.
Yoon Suk-Yeol’s lawyers have demanded Yoon’s release, arguing that the arrest of the former president was based on an invalid warrant.
A district court in Seoul has rejected the lawyers’ request. Investigators from the anti-corruption agency CIO believe they can arrest Yoon on Thursday or Friday.
According to South Korean law, an arrested person must be released within 48 hours if he is not detained, which Yoon is not. But the deadline has been frozen while the court considered the lawyers’ request.
According to the lawyers, the suspended president has been questioned for ten hours, but refuses to say anything more. He is exercising the right to remain silent, which he already referred to when he was arrested on Wednesday.
The arrest came after a several-hour police operation at the presidential residence in Seoul, where Yoon had been staying since he was stripped of presidential power on December 14.
Yoon, a 64-year-old former prosecutor, is being investigated along with several other political and government officials for attempting to stage a rebellion, a charge that could result in the death penalty.
Close to 1,000 police officers and investigators from the anti-corruption agency CIO were on site at the residence at the time of the arrest, but initially did not get further than the gates. There, some commotion broke out as loyal supporters of Yoon, gathered outside, tried to prevent police and investigators from arriving.
THE FACTS The crisis in South Korea
South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol imposed a state of emergency late in the evening on December 3rd to protect the country from “communist forces”. It happened with reference to the fact that the opposition had completely paralyzed the government’s work.
On the night of 4 December, parliament voted to lift martial law and the state of emergency was declared invalid.
Yoon Suk-Yeol was stripped of presidential power on December 14, when parliament voted to impeach him.
In addition to the impeachment process in the Constitutional Court, the anti-corruption unit and the police are conducting a joint criminal investigation against Yoon.
Yoon has been suspended from office indefinitely. Between December 14 and January 15, he stayed in the presidential residence where he refused to be arrested.
An attempt to arrest the former president on January 3 was stopped by security guards who physically obstructed the police.
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