A man accused of posting false information about the victims and bereaved families of the 2014 Sewol ferry sinking and the Itaewon crowd crush in 2022 was sentenced to one year in prison Monday. The Seoul Western District Court handed down the sentence to the man, known only by his surname Kang, after convicting him of defamation. Kang, in his 50s, was arrested and indicted on charges of writing false and insulting posts about people involved in the two disasters on his blog since 2021. He alleged that the Itaewon disaster was an organized and planned incident, and that the bereaved families of the Sewol ferry sinking were the same people as the bereaved families of the Itaewon disaster. The court said the defendant not only caused suffering to the bereaved families by repeatedly posting baseless claims but also misled members of the public. A total of 304 people, mostly students on a trip from a high school in Ansan, near Seoul, died when the overloaded Sewol ferry capsized on April 16, 2014. The crowd crush accident in the central Seoul district of Itaewon killed 159 people in October