Russian Interpol hopes crushed as South Korean Kim Jong Yang elected president

Bloomberg

Interpol delegates elected South Korean Kim Jong Yang as the new president of the global policing body after international criticism of the possibility that rival Russian candidate Aleksander Prokopchuk might get the job.
Kim was selected in a snap election organised at Interpol’s general assembly in Dubai following the arrest in China of former president Meng Hongwei last month. Interpol didn’t immediately disclose on its website the margin of victory for the South Korean, which was organised on a one country-one vote basis.
The election had become deeply political in recent days as US and other western countries warned that if elected, Prokopchuk, as a high-ranking police official in Russia, could abuse
Interpol protocols to harass political opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Yukos Oil Co. founder and Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in a Russian prison, said that Prokopchuk, also head of Interpol in Russia, had violated the agency’s rules by appealing to several nations to issue arrest warrants for him even after the Russian petitions had been rejected.
Russian officials in turn immediately accused the US of interference in a democratic process to ensure Prokopchuk did not get the job.
“The US crudely interfered in the elections of the president of this international organisation,” Vladimir Dzhabarov, a senator in the Russian parliament and a general in the FSB domestic security service, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
“There was pressure put on the member countries.”
The president of Interpol is the head of the executive committee that oversees the global policing body.
The Lyon-based agency is run by Secretary General Juergen Stock. Meng had been China’s deputy minister of public security and after being elected as the head of the global policing agency in November 2016, was expected to remain president until his term expired in 2020 before his sudden arrest.
Officials from Ukraine, who have been at odds with their neighbour since the annexation by Russian forces of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine, hailed the election result.