President Lee Jae-myung on Wednesday criticized a man in his 50s who was arrested for spreading disinformation about social disasters, saying, "Even inhumanity has its limits. Why are they doing this?"
Lee shared a news article on X (formerly Twitter) and wrote the comment alongside it. "This is the third arrest over false comments," Lee said. "Imagine if your own family had suffered such harm. Shouldn't we put ourselves in their shoes?" He added, "We will investigate more thoroughly and punish them sternly going forward."
The article Lee shared reported that police had arrested a man in his 50s for spreading thousands of pieces of disinformation related to the Sewol ferry, Itaewon, and passenger plane disasters, and for repeatedly posting defamatory and insulting messages targeting victims and bereaved families.
The suspect, identified only as A, is accused of continuously spreading false posts on major domestic online communities and platforms from 2022 through this year. The posts claimed that "the Sewol ferry was a staged nationwide fraud," "the passenger plane accident was a sham exploiting corpses for profit," and "the Itaewon incident was a shoddy film using dummies to play with corpses." The false posts by A reportedly numbered around 3,000.
This marks the third arrest since the launch of the Secondary Victimization Crime Investigation Division under the National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency. In January and April, a man in his 60s and another man in his 50s were also arrested for spreading insulting falsehoods about the Itaewon and Sewol ferry disasters.
