Police raid on squatters leaves five dead in building fire in Seoul

The early morning raid on the apartment block ended a 24-hour standoff between squatters and police

Police commandos today stormed a building in the heart of Seoul during a dramatic dawn raid which left at least five people dead and 20 injured after petrol-fuelled fire tore through the building.

Fighting between protesters and police escalated quickly, with demonstrators hurling petrol bombs, acid and bricks down towards the police lines.

The dead are thought to include residents of the apartment block who had been trapped inside as flames engulfed its roof and walls. The building is due for demolition but the redevelopment plans have met with fury and violence from many of its inhabitants.

At least one member of the police commando was reportedly killed on the roof, where the flames are thought to have ignited the protesters’ supplies of paint thinner and home-made explosives.

The early morning assault on the five-storey building – a raid that involved lowering the commandos from a crane in a steel container - followed a near 24-hour standoff between police and about 40 squatters.

Several members of the group used Molotov cocktails to repel earlier attempts by police to enter the building, said eyewitnesses. Police – described by some eyewitnesses as “out to kill” the protesters - returned fire with powerful water cannons. That tactic was met with a salvo of makeshift missiles from the building that included golf balls and stones.

The protest, which creates potentially huge headaches for South Korea’s embattled president Lee Myung Bak, was being staged in opposition to plans that would see large areas of Seoul’s central Yongsan ward re-developed on a grand scale. The squatters’ principal grief is the low level of compensation they are being offered for being forced out of their homes.

The violent and deadly end to the siege highlights the extreme volatility of public opinion in South Korea, where discontent on a wide range of issues has sparked mass street protests and fierce anti-government rhetoric.

In answer to growing public criticism of his handling of the economy, Mr Lee yesterday reshuffled his cabinet, replacing many of the key financial posts with new faces. But, significantly, the president also replaced Seoul’s police chief over the way the mass anti-government protests had been handled over the summer.

The protests in Seoul and other major Korean cities began over plans to resume imports of US beef – plans which some believed posed a BSE-related health risk. But the tone of the demonstrations quickly morphed into a more general antipathy towards the government, which then grew more intense as the export-led economy began to suffer in the global financial meltdown.

Protest leaders on the streets of Seoul were not provided with a model of stability and calm by the country’s own parliament and the seat of its volatile democracy. Recent weeks have seen sit-in protests within the parliament building itself, one of which culminated with a battle involving sledgehammers, power saws and water hoses.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5550919.ece