Knife attacker hoped to end South Korea’s presidential bid, police say

The man who stabbed South Korea’s main opposition leader in the neck last week wanted to kill him so he would never become president, police said, in an alarming escalation of political polarization.

A 66-year-old man arrested after the attack was handed over to prosecutors on Wednesday to be formally charged on charges of attempted murder. South Korean police have not released his name, but he was identified by local news media by his surname, Kim.

According to police, the man had been planning to kill Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the liberal Democratic Party, for months. He even prepared an eight-page manifesto and asked a friend to release it to relatives and the news media after the attack. .

On Wednesday, Mr Lee, 59, was released from a hospital in the capital Seoul, where he was recovering from surgery on a jugular vein damaged in the attack.

The attack, the worst against a South Korean politician in nearly two decades, drew attention to political polarization and mutual hostility between conservative and liberal South Koreans, which appeared to deepen ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for April . Mr Lee lost the 2022 presidential election to Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative, by a razor-thin margin, and he hopes to run again in 2027.

Standing in front of supporters and TV cameras as he left Seoul National University Hospital, Mr Lee called for “an end to the bellicose politics where one side is not satisfied until it kills the other side.”

“I hope that this incident, which has shocked everyone, will be a milestone towards ending the politics of hatred and confrontation and restoring a politics of mutual respect and coexistence,” he said.

The suspect was “driven to commit this extreme crime by his personal political beliefs,” said Woo Cheol-moon, police chief in Busan, a port city in southeastern South Korea where the Jan. 2 attack took place.

The suspect told investigators he was unhappy with what he saw as slow progress in the trial of Mr. Lee, who faces corruption and other charges. Mr Lee has denied these allegations and accused Mr Yoon’s government of using the investigations as political revenge

By killing Mr Lee, the man hoped to “stop him from becoming president” and hinder his political allies in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Mr Woo said at a news briefing.

The suspect made similar claims in his eight-page manifesto, the text of which was not released, Mr Woo added.

The man insisted he acted alone, and police said they could find no others involved in the attack. But they questioned a man in his 70s, who they said was informed by the suspect of his plan and entrusted with seven sealed envelopes containing his manifesto, which were addressed to relatives and news media. The suspect asked the man to post his manifesto to his relatives only if he failed to kill Mr Lee, police said. The mail was intercepted by the police before it reached the relatives.

Police say the suspect had been preparing an attack for months after buying a camping knife online in April last year. He began stalking Lee in June and attended six of his political events across the country, officials said. When he approached Mr Lee on January 2, he wore a paper crown and a hand sign to make him look like a supporter. According to livestream footage of the attack, he asked for Mr Lee’s autograph before plunging his knife into his neck.

He was arrested by the police on the spot.

“I’m sorry for causing concern,” he told reporters on Wednesday as he was transferred from a police station in Busan. Before entering the prosecutor’s office, he told reporters that he acted alone.

“How can I plan this with someone else?” he said.

Police did not reveal the suspect’s political leanings, citing privacy rules, but said he enjoyed watching conservative YouTube channels. South Korean news media said the suspect was a member of Mr. Yoon before shifting his affiliation last year to Mr. Lee in an apparent attempt to gain better access to his political agendas.

Mr. Yoon has condemned the knife attack as an act of “terror”, and his party blamed it on “radicalized politics”. But Mr Lee’s opposition party accused police on Wednesday of withholding details of the suspect’s party affiliation to minimize possible political fallout against Mr Yoon and his party ahead of April’s elections.

“Although the police refused to release complete data, we see that the flood of fake news about this political terror is reaching a dangerous level,” said Kwon Chilseung, a spokesman for the Democratic Party.

Mr Lee’s narrow loss to Mr Yoon in 2022 has only exacerbated South Korea’s political divide, with their fervent supporters spreading hate speech and conspiracy theories against each other online. After Mr. Lee was attacked, many of his conservative opponents spread rumors that the episode was “fake news” and that Mr. Lee had suffered only a minor injury from a “paper knife” or a “wooden chopstick.”