SEOUL, South Korea -- Parents of high school students killed in the South Korean ferry disaster marched on the office of President Park Geun-hye in central Seoul on Friday as prosecutors tightened their investigation around a family that controls the operator of the ferry.
Holding photos of their children, the parents said they went to ask for a meeting with Park to demand an inquiry into allegations that a tardy response by her government drastically increased the number of deaths in the country's worst disaster in decades.
They also demanded that the government dismiss a top news editor at KBS, South Korea's largest public broadcasting company, where the government has at least an indirect influence in appointing its top management. Some local media outlets quoted the editor as saying during a recent lunch with colleagues that the number of dead in the ferry tragedy was "not many compared with the number of people killed in traffic accidents each year."
Initiallly, KBS denied that the editor made the comment.
"We are not criminals," Kim Byong-kwon, whose daughter died in the sinking of the ferry Sewol on April 16, shouted through a loudspeaker. "We have come here not as protesters but to make an appeal to her."
Two senior presidential aides met family representatives. For 12 hours, hundreds of parents and supporters staged a sit-in near Park's presidential palace, until Kil Hwan-young, head of KBS, appeared and apologized for the editor's "inappropriate" comment.
Park's approval ratings have sharply dropped since the disaster, with some South Koreans calling for her resignation.
On Thursday, eight university students climbed the landmark statue of an ancient Korean king in central Seoul, unfurling a banner that said, "Down with the Park Geun-hye regime!" They were quickly detained by police.
As of Friday, 273 people were said to have died in the disaster, a vast majority of them students. Divers were still searching the sunken ferry and its vicinity for 31 people who remain missing more than three weeks after the overloaded vessel sank off southwestern South Korea.
Park has apologized several times for failing to prevent the disaster and what she called her government's fumbling in the early stages of rescue efforts. Under the mounting pressure, she has vowed stern punishment, blaming the accident on "the deep-rooted evils from the past" -- corporate greed and collusive ties between businesses and regulators that she said bred lax safety measures and loose regulatory enforcement.
Also Friday, prosecutors tightened their investigations around the family of Yoo Byung-eun, who had made headlines in the 1990s when he was investigated in the mass suicide of 32 members of a religious cult and was convicted of fraud.
Yoo, in his 70s, had since largely disappeared from the public view until the ferry disaster. The ferry operator, Chonghaejin Marine Co., is controlled by a company owned by his two sons.
Yoo, who has recently worked as a professional photographer, said through his lawyer and public relations agency that he was not a shareholder of Chonghaejin and was not involved in its management.
But investigators said they were looking into whether Yoo was controlling the ferry company through his children, as well as allegations that his family has been using Chonghaejin and other companies as tools to raise illegal funds.
Those companies, run by family members and their associates, were interlocked with one another through cross-shareholdings, which investigators said allowed the family to control them like a typical South Korean family-controlled business empire. But theirs were mostly obscure companies with small revenue.
Prosecutors said they were seeking to arrest Kim Han-sik, the head of Chonghaejin, on charges of ignoring a routine overloading of the Sewol to generate profits at the cost of safety for passengers. Authorities did arrest Lee Jae-young, 62, head of a company named Ahae Corp., on charges of squandering corporate funds by buying millions of dollars worth of Yoo's photos at prices far higher than market values.
Prosecutors also were seeking to arrest the heads of two other companies on similar charges, as well as several Yoo family members.
Yoo was not immediately available for comment. Questions to his public relations agency about the allegations against him were not answered.
A Section on 05/10/2014