By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Six people, including a police officer, died and 23 were injured Tuesday morning in a blaze when a SWAT team stormed a four-story building to remove 40 tenants occupying it to protest a redevelopment project in Yongsan, central Seoul.
``The injured, some of them severely burned, were hospitalized. One of the tenants is unconscious,'' Baek Dong-san, head of the Yongsan Police Station, said. The bodies were sent to the National Institute of Scientific Investigation for identification and autopsy.
The occupiers were demanding more compensation for their leaving the building, claiming the money offered by owners and the city was too small for them to get new homes and open shops.
Police started the eviction operation at 6:42 a.m. by using a crane to lift a container to the rooftop of the building, with 50 SWAT officers inside.
Forty minutes into the operation, a five-meter-high lookout post, which the tenants had set up, caught fire. The flames spread to the whole rooftop and the post collapsed.
``The fire broke out as the ralliers sprinkled paint thinner and threw Molotov cocktails when policemen jumped into the lookout post,'' Baek said.
The tenants prepared a large amount of thinner before staging the sit-in, Monday. They made Molotov cocktails with the thinner and threw them at police.
Some tenants, however, claimed the fire started at a place where the Molotov cocktails were not kept, raising suspicion that police set fire to the post in order to get the occupiers to evacuate the building.
The fire was extinguished after about 40 minutes, and police evicted all the protesters.
``The ralliers fired 700 marbles and golf balls with slingshots and threw 150 Molotov cocktails, 40 bottles of hydrochloric acid and 1,000 bricks at police and nearby buildings, causing fires and destroying passing cars. We could no longer overlook their illegal behavior, so we launched the operation,'' Baek said.
The tenants occupied the building Monday morning, saying they would not leave until their demands were met.
``We'll thoroughly investigate the case together with the prosecution. I express my condolences to the deceased and their bereaved family members,'' Baek said.
Criticism is mounting over the police action. It was confirmed that Kim Seok-ki, chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency who was designated as the commissioner general of the National Police Agency, approved the mobilization of the SWAT team. The prosecution is probing the incident. President Lee Myung-bak instructed the Cabinet to make a thorough investigation, while opposition parties demanded Kim's resignation.