Prosecutors investigating allegations of a botched inquiry and cover-up in the Jang Yun-gi case have questioned Park Sung-joo, former head of the National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency, as a suspect over allegations that he ordered the case to be split between the criminal affairs and women and juvenile affairs divisions.
The Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office summoned and questioned Park last week after booking him on charges including abuse of authority, according to legal sources on the 1st. Prosecutors focused on how the police came in May to assign the murder of a Gwangju high school student and Jang's stalking and sexual assault of a part-time coworker separately to the criminal affairs division and the women and juvenile affairs division.
Prosecutors are examining in particular whether the police's inadequate initial response to Jang's stalking contributed to the subsequent killing of the high school student, and whether the police leadership deliberately ordered the cases to be separated in the process.
In earlier questioning by prosecutors and police, investigators on the frontline team at the Gwangsan Police Station in Gwangju, which handled the Jang case at the time, testified that they had sought to merge the inquiry to include a sexual violence case Jang committed against a Vietnamese woman two days before the murder, but that the National Office of Investigation directed a separate probe through the Gwangju Metropolitan Police Agency. According to the accounts, Park, then head of the National Office of Investigation, relayed a message through the office's violent crime section chief to his counterpart at the Gwangju agency to investigate the two cases separately.
Based on those statements, prosecutors are widening the scope of the investigation to the police leadership at the time. Four officials in the leadership then, including the head of the criminal investigation bureau at the National Office of Investigation, have also been booked on the same charges as Park and are under investigation. Prosecutors are concentrating on determining whether the order to separate the investigations was a normal division of duties or an attempt to play down the link between the cases or to avoid responsibility for a flawed inquiry.
Park has flatly denied the cover-up allegations. "There is a reason the duties of the criminal affairs division and the women and juvenile affairs division are separated," he said in July. "This case had to be investigated alongside measures to protect the victim, so the sexual offense portion was assigned to the women and juvenile affairs division, which specializes in crimes involving personal relationships." He added: "For the murder charge, the police detention period is only 10 days, which left effectively about a week of actual investigation time, so we had no choice but to divide the charges among the responsible departments." He maintained that it was a routine investigative command.
Prosecutors plan to decide whether to indict Park and other members of the police leadership at the time after wrapping up their questioning.
The National Office of Investigation, which is looking into the allegations separately from prosecutors, also plans to conclude soon its investigation of four officers, including the then chief of the Gwangsan Police Station, the head of its criminal affairs division, a violent crime team leader and a team member.
