The Jeju District Court granted an arrest warrant on the 25th for the police sergeant accused of closing two missing-person cases with false entries, holding that he might flee or destroy evidence. He faces three charges: dereliction of duty, forgery and use of official electronic records, and obstruction of official duty by deception. He was taken into custody late that afternoon and, according to 연합뉴스 as carried by 한국경제, is still denying it — maintaining in questioning what he said at the time, that he had been in contact with the missing woman.
What is new today is what he typed. 서울경제 reports that when he closed the May report roughly two and a half hours after it was filed, he entered the reason in the national missing-persons profiling system as "traffic accident casualty." There was no basis for saying she had been in a traffic accident.
The same account sets out the interval that followed. The family filed a second report on the 19th of last month. The search using helicopters and drones began on the 20th of this one. The body was found about 400 metres in a straight line from where she had been staying.
An autopsy the day before matched her dental records, and identification was confirmed on that basis. No unusual fractures or clear external injuries were found, and an expedited DNA analysis is under way. The cause of death has not been established, and 서울경제 reports criticism that the police raised the possibility of suicide before it was.
The political track moved again. The governing party set up a police reform task force the previous day under the lawmaker 김남희. Its leader, 김민석, said he had asked for a police reform plan back when he was prime minister and had watched it fail to progress; the alternatives he listed were wider external audit, stronger grounds for recusing investigators, better explanation to victims, and legal liability for unlawful or negligent investigation. Command supervision and where responsibility sits, he said, have to be established more firmly. Lawmakers who came from the police, he said, were placed on the task force as advisers rather than members.
서울경제 puts this alongside other cases: a stalking murder in Namyangju, the Jang Yun-gi case, and a killing in Seogwipo on the 23rd in which a family filed a missing-person report in Seoul and the request for cooperation reached the Seogwipo station about eighteen hours later. Its argument is that the pattern is of gaps being found and rules being changed only after each case breaks.
Why it is on the board
Seventh on 한국경제's most-read list when we collected and twenty-fourth on 서울경제's, with a clip on the case in the Korean video lens.
This is the third instalment we have carried of this thread. Six of the thirty Korean items are the case, and two of the six are about the officer — the warrant and his denial, and the catalogue of gaps. Two more are about what has grown around it on the island: rumours filling social media, and public figures saying they have become afraid of Jeju. The last two are the party's task force and why the body took three months to find.
확인: 한국경제 · 서울경제 · 이데일리