The sinking is an unsolved mystery.
The capsize mechanism and the crew’s departure are tried facts. Status is convicted, not unsolved.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Notoriety82
Mystery35
Scale80
Evidence75
Legal impact78
Culture70
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Quick answers
When did MV Sewol sink?
The ferry listed and capsized on the morning of 16 April 2014 in the Yellow Sea near Jindo, on the Incheon–Jeju route. It had left Incheon the previous night.
How many people died?
Korean official accounting used in the trials is 304 dead or missing out of 476 aboard, with 172 rescued. About 250 of the dead were Danwon High School students. Early search tallies of recovered bodies and still-missing persons shifted by single digits as the salvage continued.
Who was convicted?
Captain Lee Joon-seok received a life sentence, upheld by the Supreme Court on 12 November 2015, for homicide by wilful negligence and related counts. Other crew received terms from about 18 months to 12 years on the final appeal path. Some Coast Guard and regulatory officials were separately convicted or dismissed.
What caused the capsize?
Courts and investigation bodies pointed to a combination of a sharp turn, excess and poorly secured cargo, reduced stability after rebuilding, and insufficient ballast — not a wartime act and not a single unexplained hole.
Why did passengers stay inside?
Repeated announcements told them to wait. The captain did not issue a timely abandon-ship order. The Supreme Court treated that omission, plus the crew’s departure, as the core of the homicide-by-wilful-negligence finding.
When was the ship raised?
The hull was brought up on 23 March 2017 and later moved for examination and memorial use. Salvage was meant to recover remaining missing people and to preserve the ship as evidence.
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.