Jung Su-yeon crawled on her hands and knees through the frantic legs of South Korea’s security forces to save democracy.

She had rushed through her city of Seoul shortly after the president shocked the world by announcing martial law and sending the army to the gates of parliament to seize power.

Helicopters circled overhead as crowds of police and military stood between Ms Jung and her colleagues making a last stand.

“The MPs and their secretaries all jumped the walls to get inside, but there were still police [there] and a fight broke out,” she told The Telegraph in the early hours of Tuesday morning. “I managed to crawl between the legs of a policeman.”

Once inside, Ms Jung – who works for the opposition Democratic Party’s secretary general Kim Yoon-deok – found herself in a face-off, and she was unsure where the situation would end.

“Paratroopers tried to break into the building so we fought back by spraying fire extinguishers… they were fully armed so we were worried that there might be bloodshed,” she said. “There were some injured people in the process, some with broken glasses and some people fell to the ground.”