GWANGJU — Prosecutors investigating allegations of a botched police probe in the Jang Yun-gi case have indicted four officials without detention, including the former head of the National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency, on charges of abuse of authority.
A special investigation team at the Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office said on the 2nd that it had charged four people: the former head of the National Office of Investigation, the former acting chief of its violent crime investigation division, the former chief of its women and juvenile crime investigation division, and the current head of its sexual violence investigation section.
Prosecutors believe the four ignored requests from front-line investigators to merge and jointly refer two cases in order to conceal the connection between the murder of a high school girl in Gwangju in May this year and an earlier stalking and sexual violence case.
According to prosecutors, investigators at the Gwangju Gwangsan Police Station found during the murder investigation that the suspect, Jang Yun-gi, had committed stalking and sexual violence against a foreign woman two days before the killing.
The investigators concluded the two cases were linked in timing, location and method, and pushed to combine them. But prosecutors determined that the former investigation chief, concerned about criticism over the police's inadequate response to the stalking report, ordered the two cases to be handled separately by different units.
Police had received the woman's stalking report through the 112 emergency line but closed it at the scene without registering it as a formal case, and failed to properly conduct a follow-up callback to verify her safety, prosecutors found.
Prosecutors said they confirmed that the former investigation chief made remarks to the effect of "Let's keep the rape quiet" and "It's not that we're deliberately hiding it, but there's no need for us to be the ones to bring it up first." After that instruction, working-level officials at the National Office of Investigation repeatedly rejected the Gwangsan police team's requests to merge the cases and refer them together, prosecutors said.
The Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office said the former investigation chief and others "exercised investigative command authority for the purpose of concealing the police organization's failures and avoiding public criticism, obstructing an investigation that was proceeding legitimately." It added that the link between the inadequate initial response in the earlier case and the subsequent murder was concealed for a considerable period.
