South Korea’s ex-President Yoon gets 30 years over drone operation

South Korea’s ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for sending military drones into North Korea, a move prosecutors argued was aimed at creating a pretext for his disastrous martial law declaration in 2024.

The drone flights, which Pyongyang said included the dropping of propaganda leaflets, triggered a spike in military tensions between the nations in October 2024.

Special prosecutors, who had sought a 30-year prison term for Yoon, said in April that the ex-leader’s effort to “fabricate wartime conditions” with the drones had undermined state security.

Yoon was “given 30 years in jail” for the charges involving the drones, a spokesperson for the Seoul Central District Court told the AFP news agency on Friday, without giving further details.

The ruling adds to a series of judgements against the ousted conservative leader, once South Korea’s top prosecutor, whose martial law order plunged Asia’s fourth-largest economy into its deepest political turmoil in decades.

In February, a South Korean court sentenced Yoon to life in prison after finding him guilty of leading an insurrection linked to the martial law attempt.

He was removed from office last year after the Constitutional Court upheld his impeachment, triggering a snap election that was won by liberal President Lee Jae Myung.

Yoon’s lawyers said he neither ordered nor later approved the drone operation, which they said was unrelated to martial law and instead a response to months of North Korean launches across the border of balloons stuffed with rubbish.