After a automotive rampage and two stabbings in and across the South Korean capital that shocked the nation up to now month, no less than seven individuals have been arrested on suspicion of creating threats to hold out comparable acts, the police stated on Saturday.
Lots of the arrests got here days after 14 individuals had been injured in an episode in Seongnam, a metropolis southeast of Seoul, that the authorities stated was being handled as an “act of terror.” The assailant in that case drove a automotive onto a sidewalk close to a subway station, injuring 5 individuals, then went into the station and stabbed an extra 9.
One other stabbing assault in Seoul on July 21 left one particular person lifeless and three others injured. The newest arrests in reference to the homicide threats are a part of police efforts to revive the general public’s sense of safety.
The threats, specifying instances and areas for stabbing assaults at different subway stations round Seoul, had been shared broadly on social media and unfold concern, the police say.
5 of the arrests had been made in Seoul, stated Yoon Younger-joon, the pinnacle of a cybercrime unit on the Seoul Metropolitan Police Company. As is customary, the police didn’t determine the suspects.
The threats had been posted on numerous websites on-line between July 24 and Saturday morning, the police stated, and talked about plans to kill individuals at a number of completely different subway stations and, in a single case, at an amusement park south of Seoul. The arrests came about in broadly scattered elements of Seoul, together with in Gangnam, within the jap district of Seongdong and within the southern district of Gwanak, in addition to within the metropolis’s suburbs.
The police had been capable of finding the suspects via suggestions from callers, or by monitoring the posters by their web protocol addresses. Some individuals turned themselves in, and others had been apprehended on the subway stations the place they stated the assaults would happen.
Amongst these arrested was a 14-year-old boy within the Seoul suburb of Hanam, the police in southern Gyeonggi, the province that surrounds Seoul, stated in a press release on Saturday.
{The teenager} posted on social media that he would kill individuals outdoors a subway station the subsequent day, the police stated. After receiving an emergency name and figuring out the poster, the police arrested him whereas he was strolling across the subway station on Friday.
He instructed the police that he had no intention of killing anybody however “was simply bored and posted it as a joke,” based on the assertion, which went on to warn others: “In case you publish one thing like this, even when for enjoyable, you can be arrested and punished. We’ll promptly and strictly examine homicide threats that trigger public anxiousness.”
