SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea's disgraced former President Park Geun-hye was arrested and jailed Friday over the corruption allegations that already ended her tumultuous four-year rule and prompted an election to find a successor.

A convoy of vehicles, including a black sedan carrying Park, entered a detention facility near Seoul before dawn after the Seoul Central District Court granted a prosecutors' request to arrest her.

Many Park supporters waved national flags and shouted "president" as Park's car entered the facility. An opponent held up a mock congratulatory ribbon with flowers that read "Park Geun-hye, congratulations for entering prison. Come out as a human being after 30 years."

Prosecutors can detain Park for up to 20 days, during which they are expected to formally charge her and have her jailed during the next several months of court procedures. A district court in South Korea normally issues a ruling within six months of an indictment.

The detention is yet another humiliation for Park, South Korea's first female president who was elected in 2012 with overwhelming support from conservatives, who recall her late dictator father as a hero who lifted the country from poverty in the 1960-70s despite a record of severe human rights abuses.

Prosecutors accuse Park of colluding with a confidante to extort big businesses, take a bribe from one of the companies and commit other wrongdoing. The allegations led millions of South Koreans to protest in the streets every weekend for months before lawmakers impeached her in December and the Constitutional Court ruled in March to formally remove her from office.

It made Park the country's first democratically elected leader to be forced from office since democracy came here in the late 1980s. South Korea will hold an election in May to choose Park's successor. Opinion surveys say liberal opposition leader Moon Jae-in, who lost the 2012 election to Park, is the favorite.

Moon's camp said South Korea took a step toward restoring "justice and common sense." Park's battered ruling party described her arrest as "pitiful."

Prosecutors can charge Park without arresting her. But they said they wanted to arrest her because the allegations against her are "grave" and because other suspects involved the scandal, including her confidante Choi Soon-sil and Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, have already been arrested.

The Seoul court said it decided to approve Park's arrest because it believes key allegations against her were confirmed and there were worries that she may try to destroy evidence.

Surveys had showed about 70 percent of South Koreans would support Park's arrest. After Park was jailed, some said she deserved it while others expressed sympathy for their ex-leader.

"It is pitiful that she ended up being like this," Kim In-sook, 82, said, watching a special TV program on Park at Seoul's railway station on Friday. Nearby, 77-year-old Park Seong-woo said that prosecutors and the court have done the right thing to do.

A day earlier, Park was questioned at a court hearing for nearly nine hours. As she left for the hearing, hundreds of her supporters, many of them elderly citizens, gathered at her private Seoul home. They wept, chanted slogans and tried to block Park's car before being pushed back by police.

Park is expected to face charges of extortion, bribery and abuse of power. A conviction for bribery alone has a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison and maximum of life imprisonment in South Korea.

Prosecutors believe Park conspired with Choi and a top presidential adviser to bully 16 business groups, including Samsung, to donate 77.4 billion won ($69 million) for the launch of two nonprofits that Choi controlled. Company executives said they felt forced to donate in fear of retaliatory measures including state tax investigations.

Park and Choi are accused of separately receiving a bribe from Samsung and colluding with top officials to blacklist artists critical of Park's policies to deny them state financial assistance programs, according to prosecutors. Park also is alleged to have passed on state secrets to Choi via a presidential aide.

Park and Choi deny most of the allegations. Park has said she only let Choi edit some of her presidential speeches and got her help on "public relations" issues. Choi made similar statements.

The U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) said Friday it had killed a top leader in the group’s propaganda machine and several of his associates in an airstrike in western Iraq.

Ibrahim Al-Ansari served as an “important ISIS leader,” Colonel Joseph Scrocca, U.S. spokesman in Baghdad for the coalition, told reporters, CBS News reported.

He was key to the group’s propaganda output that helped it recruit foreign fighters, as well as inciting vehicle, knife and arson attacks against American and Turkish nationals and “terror attacks” in western countries, Scrocca said.

Smoke rises after an air strike, while Iraqi forces battle with ISIS militants, in western Mosul, Iraq, March 10. The U.S.-led coalition announced Friday it had killed an ISIS propaganda team in a strike in western Iraq.REUTERS/ZOHRA BENSEMRA

The strike in the town of Al Qaim killed Ansari and four associates on March 25, Scrocca said. Al Qaim is near the border with Syria in the Euphrates Valley, which could be one of ISIS’s last territorial holds if it loses its two biggest cities: The northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa.

Read more: ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi fled Mosul, now moving between Iraq and Syria

Ansari and the four other jihadis killed served as a multimedia operations team for ISIS, an anonymous Defense Department official told AFP news agency. Their work included “brainwashing...young children to perpetuate ISIS’s brutal methods.”

In the near three years that ISIS has had control over territory in Iraq and Syria, it has produced propaganda videos featuring children (which it calls the “Cubs of the Caliphate”) purportedly executing spies, detonating car bombs and being trained at military camps.

The coalition’s attempts to eliminate ISIS leaders in Mosul have been complicated by the dense urban sprawl of the city under siege, which has contributed to scores of civilian casualties in the forces’ raids on western Mosul. One March 17 strike killed at least 140 civilians in western Mosul’s al-Jadida neighborhood, according to the U.N. International rights groups. Pope Francis criticized the coalition for the strike and the U.S. military subsequently opened an investigation into the incident.The U.S.-led coalition continues to target top ISIS leaders, specifically focusing on the figures leading the jihadi group’s military, financial, recruitment and propaganda arms.

The coalition claims that ISIS militants have been grouping the city’s residents into buildings in a bid to deter further strikes. It says it also has video evidence of ISIS fighters forcing civilians into a building, killing one who resisted, and then using the building as a position to fire at enemy forces. Scrocca told the New York Times that the coalition would release the footage soon.

(Newsweek)