SEOUL, South Korea: Thousands of South Koreans on Saturday participated in memorial events nationwide for the more than 300 people who died in a ferry disaster two years ago that deeply rattled the country.
About 2,500 people, including grieving family members and victims, gathered for an event marking the second anniversary of the sinking at a memorial altar in Ansan, where most of the victims lived, according to the city’s police.
Nearly 5,000 others are expected in the evening at a square in the capital Seoul, where relatives of the victims had camped for months in protest. Police are bracing for the possibility that the gathering may turn into an antigovernment march, said an official from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, who didn’t want to be named, citing office rules.
A total of 304 people, most of them students from a single high school in Ansan, died when the ferry Sewol sank off South Korea’s southwest coast in April 2014 in a disaster partially blamed on official incompetence and corruption.
Divers recovered 295 bodies from the ship’s wreckage and nearby seas before the government stopped underwater searches after seven months. Nine victims remain missing.
The tragedy touched off an outpouring of national grief and soul-searching about public safety. The relatives of the victims, angry that higher-level officials haven’t been held accountable, have been calling for a stronger investigation into the government’s responsibility for the disaster.
“We really want to move on,” said Jeon Myung-sun, the father of one of the student victims, during a speech in Ansan. “We would be able to go back to our ordinary lives if the people who are responsible are held responsible, and after finding out why (the accident) happened and why our children had to die.”
South Korea’s top court in November last year upheld a life sentence for the ferry’s captain. The court concluded that he committed homicide by “willful negligence” because he fled his ship without giving an evacuation order.
