A police sergeant at Jeju West Police Station, detained on charges of falsely closing a missing-person case, checked the missing man's mobile phone location four times last month after a second report was filed, records show.
According to material submitted by the Jeju Provincial Police Agency to the office of lawmaker Park Sang-woong of the People Power Party, the sergeant, identified only by the initial A, ran the location checks between 5:16 p.m. on the 20th and around 2:20 p.m. on the 21st, after a second missing-person report on the man, surnamed Jang, was filed on the 19th of last month.
But Jang's phone had been switched off on May 16, four days after he went missing on the night of May 12, and all of the attempts to trace his location failed.
The sergeant is also known to have checked Jang's location seven times between about 7:08 p.m. and 8:55 p.m. on May 15, after the initial missing-person report came in at around 6:43 p.m. that day. The records of those results were deleted on the 15th of this month, however, after the three-month retention period for personal location data expired.
The records were deleted while the sergeant was under investigation. It could not be confirmed whether police extended the retention period to secure them.
About two and a half hours after the initial report in May, the sergeant closed the case, falsely stating that he had reached Jang. He then deleted information on Jang from the management list in the missing-person profiling system.
Investigators found that the sergeant entered a "traffic accident casualty" code as the reason for the deletion, indicating that Jang had died in a traffic accident.
