Police bust Seoul school gang for extortion, abuse of peers

A group of middle and high school students who allegedly committed school violence against classmates were charged by police Friday. They are known to have extorted money from underclassmen and confined and assaulted their peers. Imitating a notorious practice of alienating fellow soldiers in the Marines, they also demoted those who lost favor with their leader to lower ranks.

Police in Seoul’s Gangseo district said 13 teenagers were charged without detention for having assaulted and extorted money from eight middle school students since April last year.

○ Violence, blackmail and even sexual molestation

According to police, the charged students are ninth graders and high school freshmen and sophomores who live in the same town. They formed a gang and named it after their leader. To form a group of ninth graders and name it after the best fighter, they forced younger members to fight each other and ranked them. Their leader also ordered members to extort money from their juniors. For example, if a high school junior set an amount to extort for sophomores, the latter extorted money from ninth graders, who in turn blackmailed their underclassmen. Another student in the gang habitually ordered his juniors to masturbate. Because of this, he lost favor of the leader and was demoted to the rank for ninth graders. He was thereafter treated as a peer by ninth graders.

○ Locking up peers up and bizarre acts of violence

Separately, prosecutors indicted three 15-year-old students for confinement and assault of their peer. On Dec. 25 last year, they played a game at a motel in Seoul’s Seongbuk district and pressured the peer who lost to drink beer mixed with urine as a penalty, according to prosecutors. Early last month, they assaulted another peer and confined him to an apartment building basement for two days to prevent him from going to police.

A similar incident also happened in Seoul’s Gwanak district on Jan 15. Police there said a 20-year-old and three teenagers were arrested Friday on the charge of confining a 17-year-old for five hours before assaulting him because the victim had spoken ill of them.

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