A Seoul court issued an arrest warrant on Thursday for a 70-year-old man accused of setting fires seven minutes apart at two Yeoksam-dong office buildings, injuring 19 people including a patent attorney who suffered cardiac arrest.
Judge Boo Dong-sik of the Seoul Central District Court granted detention after a hearing for the suspect, identified only as Mr. A, saying he posed a flight risk. Police arrested him hours after the 20 October blazes at the Shinmyeong Building and Hanyang Building, both housing the same patent law firm he blames for fraud over his registration paperwork.
"I wanted to scare them," suspect tells reporters
Walking into the warrant hearing, the suspect told journalists he did not intend to kill anyone. "Why would I try to kill? I wanted to scare them," he said, adding that he wanted to expose people he called swindlers protected by the state. When asked why he spread accelerant near an elevator, he repeated claims that the firm cheated him and waved a printout he insisted was a fake registration notice.
Yonhap News Agency reported that police believe he searched the Hanyang Building for a specific employee he had threatened during a failed arson attempt four years earlier, then set fire near an exit corridor after staff said they did not know the person. Investigators are weighing attempted-murder charges alongside arson causing injury.
Police cite planning and a prior conviction
The Suseo Police Station told the court the suspect had ended his lease days before the fires, told a landlord he was leaving for revenge, and bought containers and lighters in advance. CCTV captured him buying large sauce bottles weeks earlier that officers believe he used to carry fuel.
He was previously convicted and imprisoned for trying to burn the same firm's offices in 2022 after demanding paper certificates he believed were fabricated. Police are reviewing psychiatric records because he appeared fixated on possessing a physical patent registration, and they are tracing his movements after the fires, including time spent at restaurants and dance halls before discarding a lighter wrapped in tissue.
What detention changes
With the warrant approved, prosecutors can keep building an indictment while victims undergo treatment. The cardiac-arrest victim, a patent attorney, remained hospitalized Thursday. Landlords in Gangnam have not announced new fire-safety rules, but the back-to-back incidents revived questions about evacuation routes in older mid-rises that mix legal offices with small clinics.
For Seoul's patent bar, the case is both a security shock and a reputational crisis: the suspect's grievance centers on services the firm denies were fraudulent, yet his history shows how a paperwork dispute can escalate into mass-casualty arson when courts have already punished him once.