South Korea Pulls Report Into Jeju Air Crash After Victims’ Families Protest

Asia Pacific|South Korea Pulls Plane Crash Report After Victims’ Families Protest

South Korean officials on Saturday abruptly canceled the release of an intermediate report into the deadly crash of a Jeju Air passenger jet, after relatives of the victims disrupted a news conference, saying that the report was inadequate.

The confrontational scene unfolded after officials had earlier briefed the families privately on the latest stage of the investigation. The officials were planning to publicly release some findings from an analysis of the engines on the Boeing 737-800 that crashed on Dec. 29, killing 179 of the 181 people on board.

A lawyer for the relatives, who saw the officials’ presentation in the private meeting, said that the investigators had found no fault with the engines and instead appeared to blame birds, which struck the engines minutes before it made an emergency landing, and the plane’s pilots prematurely.

“The families did not get an adequate explanation,” said Pillkyu Hwang, the lawyer, speaking at a lectern in the Muan International Airport where the investigators of the crash had been expected to give their report. “In fact, depending on how you look at it, it kind of puts all the blame on the dead birds and the dead pilots,” he said, without specifying what details officials gave about the pilots’ actions.

“Of course, that may be the outcome of the investigation. But that requires tremendous rigor and very careful wording. And something came out that wasn’t careful at all,” Mr. Hwang said.

The relatives’ delegation said in a statement that the framing of the report could imply that final conclusions had been reached, when the crash was still under investigation. Many relatives said they feared the report could be misconstrued by the news media as being more definite than it truly was.