Lee Jae-myung Visits Incheon Hyundai Market Fire Site...Promises Livelihood Support Measures

Lee Jae-myung, leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, visited the site of the fire at Incheon Hyundai Market on the 5th to console the affected merchants and promised to prepare livelihood measures.

Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung is visiting the site of the fire at Hyundai Market in Dong-gu, Incheon, on the afternoon of the 5th to assess the damage.
[Photo by Yonhap News]

At around 3 p.m. that day, Lee visited Incheon Hyundai Market and held a meeting with the merchants, expressing sympathy by saying, "It must be very frustrating to suffer such tremendous damage overnight."

He added, "I heard that all the stores are only subscribed to a deductible insurance of about 1 million won," and mentioned, "The scale of the damage is large, but realistically, there is almost no way to get compensation through insurance."

Lee promised, "First of all, we should take care of deferring the repayment of existing loans for the merchants. They will not be able to operate for a considerable period, and since all the goods were lost, they may need to take out new loans immediately, so we will look into supporting new loans."

The affected merchants of Hyundai Market requested Lee to set up a temporary market as they will not be able to conduct business starting tomorrow. Lee said, "Right now, there is no proper means of livelihood. It will take a long time to investigate the cause of the fire and to prepare and execute the budget for compensation," and urged a representative of the Dong-gu Council of Incheon City, "In the meantime, a temporary market should be opened nearby Hyundai Market."

Meanwhile, the police urgently arrested a man in his 40s, identified as A, on suspicion of arson of a general building at around 9:50 a.m. that day. A is suspected of setting fire to five places, including a dish store and a small cargo truck, in the Hyundai Market area of Songnim-dong, Dong-gu, Incheon, for about 30 minutes starting from 11:38 p.m. the previous day. Although there were no casualties, 55 out of 205 stores in Hyundai Market were burned. The fire department deployed firefighters and equipment from 5 to 6 nearby fire stations and issued a 'Response Level 2,' extinguishing the fire after 2 hours and 50 minutes.