JEJU — A police officer detained on charges of falsely closing the missing-person case of Jang Mi-ran on Jeju Island has had his detention extended by 10 days.
The Jeju District Prosecutors' Office said on the 9th that it had requested an extension of the detention period for the assistant inspector, surnamed Boo, of the Jeju Western Police Station, and that the court granted the request. The officer's detention, which had been set to expire on the 10th, was extended through the 20th. He faces charges including dereliction of duty and forgery of public electronic records.
Prosecutors took over the case from police on the 1st of this month and have been reviewing the materials. They searched the Jeju Police Agency and the Jeju Western Police Station the previous day, and continued the searches for a second straight day to secure documents they had not obtained earlier. Prosecutors said they launched the compulsory investigation to examine how the police missing-person profiling system operates.
The officer is accused of receiving a report in May from Jang's boyfriend that she was missing while he was on night duty, then closing the case on his own about two and a half hours later with a false entry stating that "contact was made with the subject." He was also found to have listed Jang as a "traffic accident casualty" on the management list of the missing-person profiling system, an auxiliary police system for handling missing-person reports, and to have deleted the records. On July 2, he closed a missing-person case involving a man in his 60s in a similar manner.
A police investigation found an estimated 25 additional cases, beyond those of Jang and the man in his 60s, that the officer is suspected of having falsely closed on his own.
