- Nov 5, 2011
- 5,855
Heartbreaking texts sent from South Korea ferry are fake: report : on globalnews.ca : http://globalnews.ca/news/1276452/heartbreaking-texts-sent-from-south-korea-ferry-are-fake-report/
By Irene Ogrodnik Global News
TORONTO – Text messages reportedly sent by students on board a sinking South Korea ship that circulated on social media Wednesday and went viral may not be real, according to police.
Nine people have been confirmed dead, and nearly 300 of the 475 people on board—including 325 students on a school trip to a tourist island—are still missing after a ferry flipped onto its side and sank in cold waters off the southern coast of South Korea.
In a statement to national news agency Yonhap News, the Cyber Terror Response Center at the National Police Agency said Thursday that they had checked cellphone use logs of the students missing and concluded that none of those on the vessel had sent any text or made calls after the ferry sank.
“Even before checking phone logs, we’d confirmed that individuals behind a lot of other texts were not among the missing,” a police official told Yonhap. “We will hunt down the people who wrote these messages and will sternly punish them for hurting the families and causing confusion in the search efforts.”
The messages spread quickly through Twitter and Facebook. Local regional police are now reportedly trying to determine who created the messages and that those are found responsible will face criminal charges, including for defamation and obstruction of justice by deception.
By Irene Ogrodnik Global News
TORONTO – Text messages reportedly sent by students on board a sinking South Korea ship that circulated on social media Wednesday and went viral may not be real, according to police.
Nine people have been confirmed dead, and nearly 300 of the 475 people on board—including 325 students on a school trip to a tourist island—are still missing after a ferry flipped onto its side and sank in cold waters off the southern coast of South Korea.
In a statement to national news agency Yonhap News, the Cyber Terror Response Center at the National Police Agency said Thursday that they had checked cellphone use logs of the students missing and concluded that none of those on the vessel had sent any text or made calls after the ferry sank.
“Even before checking phone logs, we’d confirmed that individuals behind a lot of other texts were not among the missing,” a police official told Yonhap. “We will hunt down the people who wrote these messages and will sternly punish them for hurting the families and causing confusion in the search efforts.”
The messages spread quickly through Twitter and Facebook. Local regional police are now reportedly trying to determine who created the messages and that those are found responsible will face criminal charges, including for defamation and obstruction of justice by deception.
