Seoul: A Seoul court on Friday sentenced former defence minister Kim Yong-hyun to three years in prison on charges linked to former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s brief but controversial declaration of martial law in 2024, an official said.
Kim was charged with revealing classified military information to a civilian in order to create a special team to investigate unverified election fraud claims made by Yoon.
The former president had cited alleged electoral wrongdoing as one of the reasons for his December 2024 declaration of martial law, which lasted only about six hours before lawmakers rushed to the National Assembly and voted it down during an emergency session.
Yoon has since been convicted of leading an insurrection and remains in detention while appealing his life sentence.
Kim, meanwhile, was accused of unlawfully disclosing the identities of intelligence officers who were to be part of the special team investigating Yoon’s election fraud allegations.
Prosecutors had sought a five-year prison term, but a panel of judges sentenced him to three years, a spokesman for the Seoul Central District Court told AFP on Friday.
The judges said Kim’s offence “was one of the driving forces that made the declaration of martial law possible despite the absence of any substantive legal grounds.”
Earlier this year, Kim was sentenced to 30 years in prison in a separate case related to the martial law declaration.
Yoon’s late-night televised address at the time plunged South Korea into an unprecedented political crisis. It triggered protests, sent the stock market plunging, and caught key allies, including the United States, off guard.
