High court overturns acquittal of ex-PSS chief over phone data deletion

The Seoul High Court has overturned the acquittal of former Presidential Security Service (PSS) chief Park Jong-joon, sentencing him to one year in prison for deleting evidence related to former President Yoon Suk Yeol and others. The court found Park guilty of destroying evidence by deleting data from secure phones following Yoon's martial law declaration in 2024.

Park was indicted in December 2023 for arbitrarily deleting data from secure phones used by Yoon, former National Intelligence Service official Hong Jang-won, and former Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency chief Kim Bong-sik through a remote logout function. Special counsel Cho Eun-suk had demanded a three-year prison term for Park, but the appellate court could not rule out Park's intent to destroy evidence during the deletion of secure phone data. Park has been held in detention in a separate case after being sentenced to a prison term.

Brief written by urgent.news from The Korea Times's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.