UPDATE BELOW (12/4/2012 8:52 PM EST).

Yesterday afternoon, Ki-Suck Han, a 58-year-old man from Queens, was pushed onto the subway tracks at the 49th Street station and then killed as he was struck by an arriving train. As it happened, a New York Post photographer was on the scene and snapped some photos of the approaching train just moments before it struck the man.

The photographer later told the paper a rather self-serving story about what had taken place:

Post freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi — who had been waiting on the platform of the 49th Street station — ran toward the train, repeatedly firing off his flash to warn the operator.

“I just started running, running, hoping that the driver could see my flash,” said Abbasi, whose camera captured chilling shots of Suk’s tragic fight for his life.

The train slowed, but a dazed and bruised Han still wound up hopelessly caught between it and the platform as it came to a halt.

A shaken Abbasi said the train “crushed him like a rag doll.”

It’s possible that Abbasi’s version of the events is accurate, although flashing the camera at the train operator A) doesn’t seem to be the most obvious or helpful way of preventing the man’s death, and B) is remarkably convenient, considering the fact that the pictures Abbasi snapped while “repeatedly firing off his flash” just so happened to be perfectly framed photos of the situation, one of which made its way to the front page of today’s Post, accompanied by the grossly irreverent headliner text: “Pushed on the subway track, this man is about to die — DOOMED.”

What I find also quite distressing is the above surveillance video released by the New York Police Department. It depicts the suspect and victim arguing just before the fatal incident. But the video itself is shocking, to me at least, for two main reasons: 1) the fact that the audio is of such high quality, despite the video camera being quite far removed from the action, and 2) the seemingly non-automatic movement of the camera itself, which whirs rapidly from the left to focus on the arguing duo but continues to shake as if it’s a handheld camcorder.

It’s unclear where and how this camera was used (presumably, it’s on some sort of closed-circuit system, although the movements certainly don’t corroborate a hypothesis of an automatically-operated ceiling camera). But the high-quality audio and unsteady movements (implying a human element of some kind, perhaps?) suggest that subway users may have substantial surveillance concerns to worry about, in addition to the obvious (but highly improbable) horror of being pushed onto the tracks.

UPDATE: The New York Times has issued a correction regarding the above issue:

An earlier version of this post mischaracterized a video that the police released. The video was taken by a passenger on the platform on her phone; it was not a surveillance video.