The sinking is an unsolved mystery.
The capsize mechanism and the crew’s departure are tried facts. Status is convicted, not unsolved.
The captain’s case is over. The first-hour rescue and the depth of regulatory capture are not equally closed.
English myth sometimes turns a tried ferry wreck into a conspiracy fog.
Still open
- The first rescue hour — Whether more people could have been taken from inside the hull, and by whom, remains the bitterest operational argument.
- Regulatory capture — How far inspection agencies deferred to operators is documented in part, not as a single proven plot.
- Still-missing persons — Even after the 2017 lift, a small number of missing identifications remained a family file.
- Commission politics — Special inquiry mandates were written, rewritten and accused of both overreach and capture.
- English analogy habit — Titanic and “national 9/11” comparisons still flatten a domestic statutory story.
Myth vs record
A foreign attack sank the ship.
No court found an attack. The file is stability, cargo, a turn and command failure.
The president steered the ferry.
Park Geun-hye’s delayed appearance is a political scandal. It is not the navigational cause.
Everyone on the crew was convicted of homicide.
The homicide-by-wilful-negligence theory stuck to the captain. Other crew were convicted mainly of negligence and abandonment.
Local notes
Wire-service English
2014 English copy led with student death tolls and the captain’s photograph, then with yellow ribbons, then with the life sentence as a one-line close.
What dropped out
Rebuild tonnage, ballast figures and the Special Act’s institutional fights rarely survived the English cut.
Anniversary English
Later features returned at three years (salvage) and at Park’s fall. They seldom re-read the Supreme Court.
Sewol is a convicted maritime disaster whose English memory is stronger as an image than as a judgment.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.