Police Escort South Korea’s Former President Out Of Her Official Residence

South Korea’s disgraced president struck a defiant tone on Friday morning when a constitutional court unanimously upheld the decision to impeach Park Guen-hye: she did not appear in court and a spokesman said she would not be making any comment nor would she leave the presidential Blue House residence on Friday. “For now, Park is not leaving the Blue House today,” Blue House spokesman Kim Dong Jo told Reuters. That changed on Sunday, when Park Geun-hye, 65, who has become South Korea’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office, left the official presidential Blue House residence on Sunday in a motorcade of fast-driving black cars, flanked by police motorbikes.
And, like Friday, the former president who now faces life as a private citizen and the possibility of prison time, was likewise defiant upon arriving at her private home in the Gangnam district of the capital, Seoul: “I feel sorry that I could not finish the mandate given to me as president,” a spokesman for Park, member of parliament Min Kyung-wook, quoted her as saying. “It will take time, but I believe the truth will be revealed,” Park said in her first public comments since her dismissal.
It was not the first time the former president has had to leave the Blue House compound of traditional-style buildings at the foot of a hill in Seoul.
In 1979, after a nine-day funeral following the assassination of her father, the young Park left the Blue House with her siblings for a family home. She had been acting first lady after her mother was shot and killed in an earlier failed assassination attempt on her father. Now, having lost presidential immunity, she could face criminal charges over bribery, extortion and abuse of power in connection with allegations of conspiring with her friend, Choi Soon-sil. Both women denied wrongdoing.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Mar 12, 2017.