A South Korean court has acquitted a religious sect leader of charges that he deliberately interrupted the government’s antivirus response early last year after thousands of his worshipers became infected with the coronavirus.
However, Suwon District Court on Wednesday convicted 89-year-old Lee Man-hee of separate charges of embezzling more than $ 5 million in church funds and arranging unauthorized worship services in public spaces. His three-year prison sentence is suspended for four years.
Lee’s church, the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, issued a statement denying his transgressions and confirming plans to appeal. Kang Susana, a prosecutor in Suwon, said her office would decide whether to appeal after the verdict was analyzed.
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Lee Man-hee, a leader of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, bows during the press conference in Gapyeong, South Korea, on Monday, March 2, 2020. In the hastily held news conference, Lee, the 88-year-old leader of a religious sect that has the country’s largest group of infections, bent down to the ground twice and apologized for causing the “unintentional” spread of the disease. (Kim Ju-sung / Yonhap via AP)
Prosecutors have demanded a five-year prison sentence for Lee, who was arrested in August before being released on bail in November. They accused Lee and his church of violating the country’s infectious disease law by deliberately hiding some of the church’s members and reporting its meetings too little to avoid broader quarantines following the outbreak of the southeastern city of Daegu. February and March last year.
The court said it was unclear whether the church’s failure to provide a full list of its memberships was a crime. The collection of such basic information does not form part of the specific limits of contact detection set out by law, the court said.
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More than 5,000 of South Korea’s 70,212 cases of coronavirus have been linked to Lee’s church.