South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol avoided arrest on Friday when his security detail refused to allow investigators into his residence, where he has been sequestered since December 12.
Friday’s hours-long standoff between agents of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials (CIO) and the Presidential Security Service (PSS) answered a question in the minds of many observers of South Korea’s political apocalypse: would the PSS invoke its authority to refuse the police access to locations deemed vital to national security? Could Yoon avoid being arrested by hunkering down in such a location?
The answer turned out to be: yes they would, and yes he could. CIO investigators camped outside Yoon’s residence in Seoul for almost six hours, backed up by thousands of police officers, before abandoning their effort to serve arrest and search warrants issued by the Seoul Western District Court on Tuesday.
Yoon’s lawyers have insisted all along that those warrants could not be executed at his official residence without his consent because the president’s home is “linked to military secrets.”
PSS chief Park Jong-joon, a longtime official in the agency who was appointed as director in September 2024, turned up at Yoon’s residence with 200 of his agents in tow, supported by military forces detailed to the PSS and physically blocked CIO investigators from getting past the inner gates. […]
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