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After a automobile rampage and two stabbings in and across the South Korean capital that shocked the nation previously month, at the least seven folks have been arrested on suspicion of constructing threats to hold out related acts, the police stated on Saturday.
Most of the arrests got here days after 14 people were 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 automobile onto a sidewalk close to a subway station, injuring 5 folks, then went into the station and stabbed an additional 9.
One other stabbing assault in Seoul on July 21 left one individual 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 extensively on social media and unfold worry, 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 establish 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 folks at a number of totally different subway stations and, in a single case, at an amusement park south of Seoul. The arrests happened in extensively scattered components 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 by suggestions from callers, or by monitoring the posters by their web protocol addresses. Some folks 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 folks exterior a subway station the following 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 informed 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: “If you happen to submit 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 nervousness.”
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