Pyeongchang 2018: How is South Korea handling the protection challenges?

Pyeongchang, South Korea – South Korean police confirmed off uncommon and eclectic talents – from dancing and beating worn drums, to rappelling from a roof, sniping at and taking down hostage-taking gunmen – on the launching ceremony of a police safety unit for the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics on Wednesday.

With hi-tech instruments equivalent to explosive-detecting robots, trim police autos, smartphones developed for policing activities, and drone signal jamming devices, around 13,000 police officers can be mobilised for the Olympics, position to raise notify from February 9 to 27. 

South Korea’s police hold been intently coordinating with intelligence companies around the area, and hold put collectively a checklist of more than 30,000 of us understanding about to be a security threat, banning them from entry into the country.

Fortunately, the police hold so a long way got no data or indication of any foremost notify.

An even greater reduction to the police got right here after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un acknowledged in his Unusual Yr’s Day speech that cyber web web hosting the Olympics in South Korea became once a spacious tournament and a provide of enjoyment for the total Korean nation and offered to wait on.

North Korea’s resolution to ship a delegation of no longer greatest athletes and coaches, but additionally senior officials, cheerleaders, artists and journalists has swept away the chance of some more or much less provocation or attack by North Korea and helped make up public interest in the Olympics.

Around 13,000 police officers can be mobilised for the Olympics [Musun Kim/Al Jazeera]

It is a stark disagreement to the 1987 midair bombing incident, orchestrated by two North Korean agents, of a Korean Air flight breeze from Baghdad to Seoul, which killed all a hundred and fifteen passengers and crew members on board.

It became once later found that North Korea planned the bombing in an strive to destabilise South Korea’s transition to democracy and to frighten worldwide sports activities groups from travelling to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. 

Sarcastically, for these Olympics, without a doubt one of the famous foremost tasks for the police can be to provide protection to the North Korean delegations, as some conservatives in South Korea are unlucky with the two Koreas’ settlement to march collectively beneath the unified Korean Peninsula flag on the outlet ceremony and to area a joint girls’s ice hockey crew.

Any hurt to North Korean representatives may per chance perhaps additionally without predicament dash cool water on mild chilly inter-Korean family.

« There may per chance perhaps additionally very effectively be confrontations between conservative and progressive groups. I have faith about we can live [such confrontations] from taking place by the usage of police forces on the ground upfront. » Lee Cheol-seong, head of the Nationwide Police Agency, urged Al Jazeera.

Most certainly more mockingly, on the other hand, the two Korea’s single ice hockey crew is determined to screen a uncommon unity in the jap coastal metropolis of Gangneung, the identical notify the attach a North Korean espionage submarine infiltrated in 1996.

A forty 9 day-long manhunt resulted in the deaths of 24 North Korean agents, and 17 South Koreans, including one police officer.