Blue House to big house for disgraced president
South Korean leader trades life in palace for solitary cell while awaiting corruption trial Remnants of ferry from 2014 disaster recovered
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA— For a person whose life always seemed to revolve around South Korea’s huge presidential palace, the next several months will be lived on a much smaller scale.
Park Geun-hye entered the Seoul Detention Center in a black sedan before dawn Friday after a court approved her arrest on corruption allegations.
The ousted president registered her name and ID number, went through a simple health checkup, and gave up her personal belongings, including hairpins that held up her signature bun.
She then changed into light-green prison clothes and was locked in a solitary cell, according to a detention centre official who didn’t want to be named.
Park’s cell has a television, a toilet, a sink, a table and a mattress. She will be asked to rise at 6 a.m. and go to sleep at 8 p.m. She will have to eat at her cell and also wash her own plate, the official said.
A typical solitary cell at the detention centre is 6.56 square meters.
“She will go through the same routines as other inmates,” the detention centre official said.
Park is expected to spend several months in the detention centre while court proceedings are taking place.
She has lived in the presidential Blue House twice, first as the daughter of military strongman Park Chung-hee, who moved into the palace in 1963, two years after he staged a coup and took control of the country.
Park left the Blue House after the assassination of her father in 1979.
But, following a meteoric political career, Park returned after winning the presidency in December 2012, thanks to overwhelming support from older voters who remembered her father as a hero who rescued the nation from poverty, despite his bru- tal record of civilian oppression.
Her term was to have ended next February, but the constitutional Court removed her from office on March10 over the corruption scandal.
Occupying the slopes of a downtown Seoul mountain, the Blue House is large compound where hundreds of people work in several buildings, including a blue-roofed, 8,476-square metre hall where the main presidential office is.
When she used the office, Park needed to walk about 15 metres just to get to her desk from the door.
She is the second former president to be held at the Seoul Detention Center, which keeps criminal suspects in custody before conviction. Roh Tae-woo, who was president from 1988 to 1993, was locked there after a1995 arrest for bribery. He was convicted and sentenced to prison but was pardoned in 1997.
Its current detainees include other key figures in the corruption scandal that toppled Park, including her longtime friend, Choi Soon-sil, who is suspected of colluding with Park to extort money and favours from companies and secretly interfering with state affairs.
Billionaire Samsung heir Lee Jaeyong was detained there after being arrested for allegedly using tens of millions of dollars in corporate funds to bribe Park and Choi in exchange for business favours.
Park’s former culture minister, Cho Yoonsun, and her ex-chief of staff, Kim Ki-choon, are also being held at the detention centre following their arrests over suspicions that they blacklisted thousands of artists deemed as unfriendly to Park to deny them state support.
The current Seoul Detention Center opened in Euiwang city in 1987.
It replaced a facility originally built as a prison in Seoul in 1908.
During Japan’s colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula, the prison was notorious as a torture centre for Korean independence activists.
After colonial rule ended at the close of World War II, South Korea used the facility as a prison and later as a detention centre. SEOUL— A rusting South Korean ferry raised from the seabed last week arrived Friday at the port where it will be searched for the remains of the last nine victims of the 2014 sinking.
Dozens of relatives of the victims watched from nearby as workers from a port in Mokpo conducted operations to dock the heavy lift transport vessel that carried the 6,800-ton Sewol, lying with its rusty blue bottom facing land.
Finding the remains of the missing victims would bring a measure of closure to one of the country’s deadliest disasters.
Most of the 304 people who died when the Sewol sank on April 16, 2014, were teenagers on a school trip, triggering a national outpouring of grief and outrage over what were seen as poor government rescue efforts. The anger contributed to the ouster of President Park Geun-hye, who was arrested earlier Friday over allegations of corruption.
“He was in the dark and frightening deep seas for three years, but he’s now going to Mokpo,” Yoo Baekhyeong, the wife of a missing teacher, told reporters on a patrol boat where they watched the transport vessel depart for port.
“I want to find even just a piece of his hair. He would have been wearing his wedding ring . . . I want to find all of those things,” she said.
Salvage crews on two barges raised the Sewol last week, rolling up nearly 70 cables connected to metal beams divers had installed beneath the ferry, which was lying on its left side below 44 metres of water.
The vessel was welded in place on the transport vessel to maintain balance during the trip, and disconnecting it will take several days.
It will then be moved to a dry dock where workers will clean it before investigators begin searching for remains and for clues that could further explain the cause of the sinking, which has been blamed on excessive cargo, improper storage and other negligence.