South Korea’s disgraced former president Park Geun-hye has been arrested and jailed over high-profile corruption allegations that already ended her tumultuous four-year rule and prompted an election to find her successor.
A convoy of vehicles, including a black sedan carrying Park, entered a detention facility near Seoul on Friday after the Seoul central district court granted prosecutors’ request to arrest her. Many Park supporters waved national flags and shouted “president” as Park’s car entered the facility.
Prosecutors can detain her for up to 20 days before formally charging her, meaning she will probably be in jail while her case is heard. A district court normally issues a ruling within six months of an indictment.
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The Seoul court’s decision is yet another humiliating fall for Park, South Korea’s first female president who was elected in 2012 amid a wave of conservative nostalgia for her late dictator father, whose 18-year rule is marked by both rapid economic rise and enormous human rights abuses.
Prosecutors accuse Park of colluding with a confidante to extort big businesses, take a bribe from one of the companies and commit other wrongdoing. The allegations led South Koreans – up to 2.3 million of them – to protest in the streets every Saturday for several weeks before lawmakers impeached her in December and the constitutional court ruled in March to formally remove her from office.
It made Park the country’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office since democracy came here in the late 1980s. South Korea will hold an election in May to choose Park’s successor. Opinion surveys say the liberal opposition leader Moon Jae-in, who lost the 2012 election to Park, is the favorite.
Prosecutors can charge Park without arresting her. But they said they wanted to arrest her because the allegations against her are “grave” and because other suspects involved the scandal, including her confidante Choi Soon-sil, have already been arrested.
The Seoul court said it decided to approve Park’s arrest because it believes key allegations against her were confirmed and there were worries that she might try to destroy evidence.
In the coming weeks, prosecutors are expected to formally charge Park with extortion, bribery and abuse of power. A bribery conviction alone is punishable by the minimum 10 years in prison and the maximum life imprisonment in South Korea.
Prosecutors believe Park conspired with Choi and a top presidential adviser to bully 16 business groups, including Samsung, to donate 77.4b won ($69m) for the launch of two non-profits that Choi controlled. Company executives said they felt forced to donate in fear of retaliatory measures, including tax investigations.
Park and Choi are accused of separately receiving a bribe from Samsung and conspiring with top officials to blacklist artists critical of Park’s policies to deny them state financial assistance programs, according to prosecutors. Park also is alleged to have passed on state secrets to Choi.
The women, both in their 60s, have been friends for 40 years. Park once described Choi as someone who helped her when she had “difficulties”, an apparent reference to her parents’ assassinations in the 1970s.
Park is South Korea’s third head of state to be jailed after leaving office.
• This article was amended on 4 May 2017. An earlier version misspelled Choi Soon-sil’s name and said that “millions of South Koreans [protested] in the streets every weekend for months”.