SEOUL — Prosecutors announced plans on Tuesday to question former president Park Geun-hye of South Korea in a corruption scandal, four days after she was removed from office in a historic court ruling.

Park’s presidency formally ended Friday, when the Constitutional Court approved the National Assembly’s vote to impeach her in December.

She was the first South Korean leader ousted under popular pressure since the country’s founding president, Syngman Rhee, fled into exile in Hawaii in 1960.

Although prosecutors have identified Park as a criminal suspect accused of bribery, extortion, and abuse of power in recent months, they could not indict her or even summon her by force while she was president. But now that she has become an ordinary citizen, prosecutors moved swiftly.

On Tuesday, they said they were formally opening an investigation on her, adding that they would announce, most likely on Wednesday, when they planned to question her.

If she is summoned, she will be the first former South Korean president to be grilled by prosecutors since 2009, when former president Roh Moo-hyun was questioned on corruption allegations involving his family.

Two other former presidents — military dictators Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo — were questioned in 1995 on suspicion of bribery. The two men, former army generals, also faced sedition and mutiny charges for their roles in the 1979 military coup that brought them to power and in the 1980 massacre of antigovernment demonstrators in the southwestern city of Kwangju.

Chun was sentenced to death — the sentence was later commuted to life in prison — and Roh was sentenced to 17 years. (Both were pardoned and released in December 1997.)

New York Times