A former aide who has raised a series of allegations against independent lawmaker Kim Byung-kee has filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, arguing that his basic rights were violated as police took nearly a year to handle the case.
According to the commission on the 7th, the former aide, identified as A, filed a complaint that day requesting an investigation into how Park Sung-joo, former head of the National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency, and Hong Seok-ki, the current chief, directed the case.
In the complaint, A said that while he received no investigation results from September last year, his identity spread online, leading to continued harassment and setbacks to his professional activities and livelihood. On the reasons the investigation dragged on, he said, "Numerous circumstances suggest it stemmed not from coincidence or the complexity of the case itself, but from repeated deferrals of judgment and instructions to delay by the National Office of Investigation leadership."
A also cited the fact that Park has been indicted on charges of improperly ordering that a sex crime case and a murder case involving Jang Yun-gi, who killed a high school girl in Gwangju, be investigated separately. Raising that alongside Kim's case, he argued that delays in investigations at the level of the office's leadership may have been a recurring problem.
A said in the complaint that in both cases, frontline investigation teams proposed a direction for the probe, but decisions were delayed or the direction changed because of intervention by the leadership. "This suggests the possibility that a practice of adjusting the direction and pace of investigations for organizational self-protection has been repeated along a particular chain of command within the National Office of Investigation," he said, adding that an inquiry by the commission is needed.
The complaint also asked the commission to examine how Park and Hong directed and handled Kim's case and to determine whether the prolonged investigation violated his basic rights.
Kim is under investigation by the public crime investigation unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency's metropolitan investigation bureau on charges of demanding that Coupang penalize former aides, including A, who had taken jobs at the company, during a meal with then-Coupang Chief Executive Park Dae-joon ahead of a parliamentary audit in September last year. A is the alleged victim in that obstruction of business case.
A and others say that after leaving their jobs as Kim's aides to move to Coupang, they were transferred to regions they did not want or were dismissed, and that Kim exerted outside pressure in the process.
A had earlier filed a petition with the National Police Commission on the 28th of last month, asking it to review how Park and Hong handled Kim's case.
Separately, the public crime investigation unit on the same day asked prosecutors to seek a pre-indictment arrest warrant for Kim on charges including bribery under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes and obstruction of business. It comes about a year after police opened the investigation in September last year.
