The families of Jeju Air Crash victims enter criminal charges

Some families of people who were killed in a Jeju aircraft crash last December submitted a criminal complaint against 15 people, including the South Korean Transport Minister and the CEO of the airline, for professional negligence.

The 72 survivors require a more thorough examination of the crash, in which 179 of the 181 people were killed on board. This was the deadliest aircraft crash on South Korean soil.

The crash was “not an easy accident,” they claim, but a “great bourgeois disaster caused by negligent management of avoidable risks”.

Almost five months later, the authorities still investigate what the plane at Muan International Airport has crashed, and then broke up in flames.

The police had already opened a criminal investigation before this recent complaint and had excluded the CEO of Jeju Air, Kim E-Bae, from leaving the country, but nobody was charged because of the incident.

One of the relatives, Kim Da-Hye, condemned the “lack of progress” in investigations.

“We are full of anger and despair. After we have submitted this extraordinary level of submitting a criminal complaint, we will not give up and continue to pursue the truth,” Kim told the media in a statement.

The 15 persons named in the complaint included government officials, airlines and airport personnel who were responsible for the construction, supervision, furnishing management and bird control.

The complaint submitted on Tuesday raises questions about the circumstances of the crash, including the appropriateness of the air fuse and the strengthening of a hill at the end of the runway against the regulations.

The plane, a Boeing 737-800, started on the morning of December 29th from the Thai capital of Bangkok and flew to Muan in South Korea.

Five minutes after the pilots had contacted Muan International Airport, they reported, hit a bird and explained a Mayday signal.

The pilots then tried to land from the opposite direction in which the aircraft had landed out of the stomach without a chassis. Later it overran the runway, slammed into a concrete structure and exploded.

At the beginning of this year, the investigators stated that they had found Vogelfedern in both engines of the Jet, but did not come to the conclusion to what extent the bird strike contributed.

Since the incident, some survivors have also been organized online by a stream of conspiracies and malicious jokes.

This included suggestions that families were “enthusiastic” to receive compensation from authorities or that they were “fake victims”. From March of this year, eight people were arrested because they made such derogatory and defaming online contributions.