PAJU — A cafe owner in his 30s who locked a woman in her 60s inside a freezer at a cafe in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, causing her death, has been referred to prosecutors while in custody. Police concluded that the man planned in advance how to lure and confine the victim. No accomplice in the killing has been identified so far.
Paju Police Station said in a briefing on the 14th that it had referred the cafe owner, identified only as A, to prosecutors in custody. A boarded a transport bus at the garage of the integrated investigation duty office at Ilsan East Police Station at about 1 p.m. that day, without speaking to reporters or taking questions.
According to police, A is accused of luring the victim, a woman identified as B, to a freezer at a cafe in Paju at about 11 a.m. on the 3rd, confining her there for 27 hours and lowering the internal temperature below freezing, causing her to die of hypothermia. Investigators found that A locked the freezer from the outside with a padlock so that B could not get out.
Police believe A had B brought to Paju after being introduced to her through a gift certificate broker identified as C, in connection with so-called "gift certificate discounting," in which large volumes of gift certificates are traded and converted into cash. B's body and counterfeit gift certificates with a face value of about 50 billion won were found inside the freezer.
A police official said, "We believe the crime was committed in the course of distributing counterfeit gift certificates." The official added, "The suspect has changed his account several times during questioning, but we presume he locked the victim in the freezer out of concern that the fake gift certificates would be exposed." The official also said, "We plan to form an investigation team and continue supplementary investigation into the purpose behind producing the counterfeit gift certificates and the structure of the transactions."
