SEOUL: South Korean authorities investigating impeached President Yoon Seok Yeol were at his official residence on Wednesday to execute an arrest warrant over insurrection accusations related to his Dec. 3 martial law declaration.
Video footage showed vehicles from the investigating authorites in front of Yoon’s hill-side villa in Seoul, where he has been holed up for weeks.
Investigators were foiled on Jan. 3 from serving the first ever arrest warrant issued against a sitting South Korean president after a standoff with hundreds of presidential security agents and military guards.
Some 6,500 supporters of Yoon were gathered at the residence on Wednesday, and some ruling party lawmakers were forming a human chain to block the execution of the arrest warrant, Yonhap news agency said.
The team executing the arrest warrant, made up of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO) and the police, secured a re-issued warrant on Jan. 7 and has held multiple meetings in a bid to ensure a successful execution.
South Korea authorities at President Yoon’s residence to execute arrest warrant
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South Korea authorities at President Yoon’s residence to execute arrest warrant
- Video footage showed vehicles from the investigating authorites in front of Yoon’s hill-side villa in Seoul, where he has been holed up for weeks
Gordon Brown ‘regrets’ Iraq War support, new biography says
- Former UK PM claims he was ‘misled’ over evidence of WMDs
- Robin Cook, the foreign secretary who resigned in protest over calls for war, had a ‘clearer view’
LONDON: Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown regrets his failure to oppose Tony Blair’s push for war with Iraq, a new biography has said.
Brown told the author of “Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose,” James Macintyre, that Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who opposed the war, had a “clearer view” than the rest of the government at the time.
Cook quit the Cabinet in 2003 after protesting against the war, claiming that the push to topple Saddam Hussein was based on faulty information over a claimed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
That information served as the fundamental basis for the US-led war but was later discredited following the invasion of Iraq.
Brown, chancellor at the time, publicly supported Blair’s push for war, but now says he was “misled.”
If Brown had joined Cook’s protest at the time, the campaign to avoid British involvement in the war may have succeeded, political observers have since said.
The former prime minister said: “Robin had been in front of us and Robin had a clearer view. He felt very strongly there were no weapons.
“And I did not have that evidence … I was being told that there were these weapons. But I was misled like everybody else.
“And I did ask lots of questions … and I didn’t get the correct answers,” he added.
“Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose,” will be published by Bloomsbury next month.
