Jailed former president accused of a plot to provoke military aggression from North to help consolidate his rule.

Prosecutors have indicted former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for insurrection, accusing him of seeking to provoke military aggression from North Korea to help consolidate his power.

Special prosecutor Cho Eun-seok told a briefing on Monday that his team had indicted Yoon, five former cabinet members, and 18 others on insurrection charges, following a six-month probe into his declaration of martial law last year.

“To create justification for declaring martial law, they tried to lure North Korea into mounting an armed aggression, but failed as North Korea did not respond militarily,” Cho said.

Yoon plunged South Korea into a crisis when he declared martial law in December 2024, prompting protesters and lawmakers to swarm parliament to force a vote against the measure.

The decree was quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and Yoon was subsequently impeached, removed from office, and jailed.

Martial law plotted for more than a year

Cho, one of three independent counsels appointed by South Korea’s current president, Lee Jae Myung, to investigate the martial law declaration, said Yoon and his supporters in the military had plotted since at least October 2023 to introduce the measure.

The plan involved installing collaborators in key military posts and removing a defence minister who opposed the scheme, Cho said.

The group even held dinner parties to build support for the plan among military leaders, he added.

Cho said Yoon, his Defence Minister Kim Yong Hyun, and Yeo In-hyung, commander of the military’s counterintelligence agency at the time, had directed military activities against North Korea since October 2024, seeking to provoke an aggressive response that would justify the declaration of martial law.

Yoon was indicted last month for ordering drone flights carrying propaganda leaflets into the North to inflame tensions – prompting his successor, Lee, to say earlier this month that he was weighing an apology to Pyongyang.

‘Antistate forces’

Cho said the provocations did not draw the expected reaction from North Korea, most likely because Pyongyang was tied up in supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But Yoon pressed ahead regardless, he said, branding his political opponents – including the liberal-controlled legislature and the then-leader of his own conservative People Power Party – as “anti-state forces” in a bid to justify his actions.

Under South Korean law, insurrection is punishable by life in prison or the death penalty.

Yoon, who has been in jail since July following a stint in custody earlier in the year, insists that his martial law declaration was intended to draw public support for his fight against the opposition Democratic Party, which was abusing its control of parliament to cripple the work of the government.

“Yoon declared emergency martial law to monopolise and maintain power by taking control of the legislative and judiciary branches and eliminating his political opponents,” Cho said.

Witness accounts and videos verified by The New York Times show how gunmen killed at least 15 people on Sunday at a Jewish celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney in what the authorities called a terrorist attack.

Two suspects opened fire from a footbridge at hundreds of people who had gathered for a Hanukkah celebration. At one point, after one of the shooters walked down from the bridge, a bystander grabbed the gunman from behind and wrested his gun away before pointing it back at him, according to videos and witness accounts.

Police arrived and opened fire at the gunmen, videos show. One of the shooters was killed, the police said, and the other was wounded and in custody.

When the gunmen arrived, they emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by the footbridge. They fired on people nearby and killed at least two, according to a witness who tried to help the victims.

The gunmen then proceeded to the high ground of the bridge with three long guns, visible in several videos, and fired into the crowd in the park.

After about a minute, one gunman wearing white pants descended from the bridge, videos and witnesses confirmed. He continued shooting as he walked toward the crowd gathered for the Hanukkah celebration, which featured free donuts and music.

The gunman on the bridge wearing black pants kept firing. He waved away beachgoers swearing at him, telling them to go, witnesses said, as he shot at the crowd that had gathered for the holiday festival.

A man who had been sheltering between parked cars is seen in one video rushing toward the gunman with the white pants, who continued to draw nearer to the Hanukkah event. The man wrestled the rifle from him and aimed it at the gunman, who retreated to the bridge.

Shortly afterward, the police began to fire at the gunmen. In videos, they can be seen ducking to avoid incoming fire before the man in white pants appears to be hit, and collapses.

The man in black pants kept firing at the police for another minute, videos show and witnesses confirmed, shooting from both sides of the bridge before he appears to be shot as well.

“He’s down, he’s down,” a witness yelled in a video that captured most of the incident.

In the area where the Hanukkah festivities were held, several victims could be seen in witness video lying on the ground, apparently lifeless. Witnesses described a scene of sadness and sudden triage. Civilians, security guards for the Hanukkah event and lifeguards administered CPR as ambulances carried away those who had been killed and wounded.

A 1,000-strong “dark fleet” of rogue oil tankers skirting sanctions has emerged as a new target for the U.S. and Ukraine, a senior maritime intelligence analyst claims.

Michelle Wiese Bockmann warned the aging fleet poses geopolitical risks and threats of $1 billion oil spills, with the recent U.S. seizures in Venezuela and Ukrainian drone strikes in the Black Sea marking a turning point for both nations in their efforts.

“There are about 1,000 vessels worldwide that are trading sanctioned crude tankers containing sanctioned Iranian, Venezuelan and Russian oil,” Bockmann told Fox News Digital.

“These vessels are a lifeline for these regimes, because they’re used for shipping oil to fund the war in Ukraine, and also give money to the illicit Maduro regime,” she added.

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“This is a brand-new problem for the U.S., and now Ukraine has signaled they are going to target these vessels the same way,” she said. “There is a new strategy to deal with this dark fleet, which is the lifeline of sanctioned oil revenues, and now under attack by the U.S. and Ukraine. The strategy is all to counter what we call gray-zone aggression.”

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Recent Ukrainian naval drone strikes have disabled several tankers in the Black Sea, including the Dashan, part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet that Ukraine says helps Moscow export oil in defiance of sanctions, according to Reuters.

“It is dangerous and could be interpreted as a form of gray-zone aggression in order to continue to keep oil revenue flowing,” Bockmann said.

“This is all a billion-dollar oil spill catastrophe waiting to happen,” she added, pointing to the environmental and navigational risks posed by poorly maintained, uninsured ships.

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She said a subset of “about 350 to 400 vessels at any one time are not only sanctioned but falsely flying flags, which is dangerous,” because false registration leaves vessels stateless and uninsured, putting crews at risk.

“This is a huge issue for maritime safety, it’s a menace to the environment, and it entails crew welfare,” Bockmann said.

These vessels, she said, are typically “elderly” and used solely for sanctioned oil trades. Many also “manipulate AIS” to show they are in one place when they are actually elsewhere.

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“They use false flagging, but also, spoofing and manipulating its AIS to show it’s in one place when it’s not. These vessels have also gone to fraudulent registries that don’t exist, which means they have no insurance,” she said. “Their certificates of seaworthiness are invalid, and they have relied on international maritime conventions to have what’s called the right of innocent passage so they can’t get intercepted.”

Bockmann said U.S. forces have used legal tools including Article 110 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows boarding of stateless vessels, to stop these ships.

“It’s my belief that they used Article 110, and they got on board that vessel, and they were absolutely entitled to remove that vessel from global trade,” she said.

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In the Caribbean, U.S. forces recently seized the tanker Skipper, sanctioned in 2022 and found to be masking its location, under a federal warrant as part of a broader campaign to disrupt illicit oil shipping.

“The recent Venezuelan tanker was carrying 1.8 million barrels of oil uninsured, so that’s a billion-dollar maritime disaster waiting to happen,” Bockmann said.

As reported by Fox News Digital, Dec. 12 saw Attorney General Pam Bondi frame the U.S. seizure of a Venezuelan crude tanker as a sanctions-enforcement action rooted in a federal court warrant.

Meanwhile, in the Black Sea, Ukraine targeted multiple alleged “shadow fleet” tankers with sea drones, according to Reuters.

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“The three tankers that have been targeted by Ukraine are all in ballast, which means that they weren’t carrying oil,” Bockmann said.

“That was carefully chosen, and they were also falsely flagged, just like in the recent case of the three tankers attacked in Ukraine. That flag was Gambia. In the U.S. case of Skipper, the flag was Guyana,” Bockmann said.

Fox News Digital’s Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.