Younger brother of South Korea ferry disaster fugitive arrested

South Korean police arrested a younger brother of the country’s most wanted man, a businessman linked to a ferry disaster in which hundreds of school children drowned, on Sunday as authorities cast a wide net for the fugitive’s family.

Yoo Byung-ho was arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, a prosecution official said.

Prosecutors and police are seeking Yoo Byungun, 73, who has eluded one of the country’s biggest manhunts for more than a month. They have arrested his wife, younger sister and her husband, a former ambassador to the Czech Republic.

His younger sister and her husband, arrested on suspicion of helping Yoo evade arrest, were allowed to go home on Saturday.

Yoo Byung-un is wanted on charges of embezzlement, negligence and tax evasion stemming from a web of business holdings centred on I-One-I, an investment vehicle owned by his sons that ran the shipping company, Chonghaejin Marine.

Chonghaejin owned the Sewol, which sank off the southwest coast on April 16 killing more than 300 people, many of them school children, on a routine journey from Incheon on the mainland to the southern holiday island of Jeju.