A police sergeant who handled missing-person reports in Jeju was released from custody on the 24th, the same morning a body believed to be one of the people whose disappearance he is accused of writing off was found on the island.
The Jeju District Court's reasoning was procedural. An emergency arrest requires that there be no time to obtain a warrant; the sergeant's whereabouts were known, so that condition was not met, and it ordered him released. That is a ruling about how he was detained, not about what he is accused of. Police applied the same day for an arrest warrant, 뉴시스 reports. He had been taken into emergency custody at about 3:29pm on the 23rd on four counts — dereliction of duty, forgery of official electronic records, uttering them, and obstruction of official duty by deception.
The number that has turned this from a case into an inquiry is 298. According to the Jeju Police Agency, quoted by 경향신문, that is how many missing-person reports the sergeant handled while on the missing-persons team from March last year to the 11th of this month. All of them are now being examined — not only the two that ended in bodies, but whether in the rest the missing person's whereabouts and safety were actually confirmed, and whether closing them involved false entries or inadequate work. The National Office of Investigation has told every provincial police agency to establish the status of its closed and unclosed missing-person cases, with the review running to November. 경향신문 also reports what made this possible: closing a missing-person case required no separate sign-off. Police have begun changing that, including final approval by a manager.
The second number is 118. 파이낸셜뉴스 reports that footage from 118 CCTV cameras near the point where Jang Mi-ran, 37, is presumed to have disappeared was deleted in its entirety. The footage covered 12 to 20 May — the presumed date is the 13th — and was erased between 11 and 19 June. Jeju Province told a legislator's office that the retention period on those cameras is thirty days and that the recordings were erased automatically when it expired. Police asked to view them 98 days after the presumed date of disappearance, 96 days after the first report on 15 May, and 61 days after the last of the footage was gone.
The first report was made by her partner. Believing the officer who took it, the family filed a second one in July saying they still could not reach her, and it was in checking that second report that police found the signs of dereliction. He was booked on the 14th of this month.
중앙일보 reports the other case. On the 2nd of last month the same sergeant is accused of closing a different missing-person report the same way, telling the family on the day they filed it that the man was safe and that he did not want his whereabouts disclosed, and clearing the entry from the national missing-persons profiling system. That man was found dead in Jeju on the 22nd.
The body believed to be Jang was found at about 10:46am on the 24th in a palm grove in Hallim-eup, about fifteen minutes' walk from where she had been staying, with clothes she was last seen in and personal effects beside it. Identification is not complete. Police say the likelihood of a crime is low and that the cause of death is still to be established. It was 101 days after the first report.
Why it is on the board
Twelfth on 중앙일보's list and seventeenth on 뉴시스's when we collected, with a clip on the case in the Korean video lens.
The measure of how large this is in Korea today is the list itself. Of the thirty items on the Korean reading ranking when we collected, eight are this case — 경향신문, 파이낸셜뉴스, 중앙일보, 한국경제, 뉴시스, 뉴스1, 조선일보 and YTN — and each newsroom is holding a different piece of it: the caseload, the deleted cameras, the court, the identification, the police assessment, the officer's record. The next most-repeated item on the same list appears twice.
확인: 경향신문 · 파이낸셜뉴스 · 중앙일보 · 뉴시스