A South Korean court handed down a 36 year jail sentence earlier today to the captain of the Sewol ferry that sank in April, but acquitted him of murdering the 304 people who died in the disaster.
The three-judge bench ruled that prosecutors, who had demanded the death penalty for Captain Lee Jun-Seok, failed to prove the most serious charge of “homicide through wilful negligence”.
But the court found Lee, 69, guilty of severe dereliction of duty, including abandoning the ferry while hundreds of passengers — most of them schoolchildren — remained trapped on board.
Three other senior crew members, who had also faced homicide charges, were sentenced to jail terms of up to 30 years.
