Tag: murder

I doubt the U.N. will do any investigation, but it is worth a try:

The family of a South Korean official who was shot dead by North Korean troops last month has asked the United Nations to look into the controversial incident.

Lee Rae-jin, the elder brother of the slain maritime official, delivered a written request for the probe to Tomas Ojea Quintana, a U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights situation in North Korea, at the U.N. Human Rights Office in Seoul Tuesday. Lawmakers of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) ― Reps. Tae Yong-ho and Ha Tae-keung ― accompanied Lee.

The request comes as the South and the North gave different accounts detailing why the official floated into the North’s waters and the circumstances of his killing. The family has also claimed the South Korean government was attempting to distort the truth by claiming the victim was trying to defect to the North, saying there was no reason for him to defect and leave his family, including his young children. (…….)

Along with the letter of request for the U.N. probe, the opposition lawmakers and the brother also revealed a letter written by the victim’s son to President Moon Jae-in.

The 18-year-old son, who is living with his mother and an eight-year-old sister, said his father had no reason to defect to the North and the government failed to protect one of its citizens. 

“I’d like to ask why my father had to go that far, what efforts the state was making to save my father and why it could not save him,” he wrote. “He was a public servant of the Republic of Korea and a citizen who should be protected. He suffered in the cold waters for a long time and was killed and burned … I want to ask who is responsible for this situation where we can’t even find his body, and what the state was doing when my father was killed brutally.” 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Nearly a year later it still seems surreal that the Korean authorities have caught the Hwaseong Serial Killer after all these decades:

Police on Thursday closed the country’s longest-standing cold case involving a series of brutal rapes and murders that began more than three decades ago.

Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency concluded in a briefing that Lee Chun-jae killed 14 women, most of them rape-murder cases, and raped nine others, wrapping up its one-year investigation into him and his killing and raping spree that terrorized the country in the 1980s and 90s. 

Lee was found responsible for all of the 10 killings of women aged 14 to 71 in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, from 1986-1991 in what is known as the worst serial murder case in the country’s modern history, the police said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

That is what the Korea Times is recommending:

How young is too young to be prosecuted? In Korea, that legal threshold is 14 years old. But after a series of horrendous crimes committed by minors in recent years, there have been growing calls for change.

The latest controversy erupted last week when a fifth grader was found to have stabbed a peer to death at her grandparents’ home in revenge for “badmouthing” her and her family.

The attacker, who “was removing blood stains” at the crime scene when police arrived, later confessed to the killing and trying to cover it up.

Because she is under 14, she will not face trial. Instead, she was sent to a juvenile review center, where she will stay for about a month for medical observation.

Shocked by the news, hundreds of people have signed online petitions urging authorities to toughen laws against minors’ crimes.

Data from the National Police Agency show that 7,364 people under 14 were sent to juvenile institutions last year, up 12.4 percent from 2015. Four crimes ― murder, robbery, assault and larceny ― accounted for 77 percent of offenses. Sexual crimes numbered 410, up 32 percent during the period.

Under juvenile laws, perpetrators under 14 cannot be sent to prison and those under 19 are exempt from the death penalty or imprisonment longer than 20 years. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This is the most bizarre North Korean defector story I have read. This could be dramatized into a movie plot:

South Korea deported two North Koreans back to the communist nation after learning that they killed 16 fellow crew members on their fishing boat and fled to the South, the unification ministry said Thursday.

The two in their 20s were sent back to the North at around 3:10 p.m. through the truce village of Panmunjom, five days after they were captured near the Northern Limit Line sea border in the East Sea on Saturday, according to the ministry.

It marks the South’s first deportation of North Koreans through Panmunjom.

“We decided to deport them after determining that accepting them to our society could pose a threat to the lives and safety of our people and that such criminals cannot be recognized as refugees under international law,” Lee Sang-min, the ministry’s spokesperson, said at a press briefing.

The government also plans to send back the fishing boat of the North Koreans, a ministry official said. 

Officials said that it took a couple of days for the South’s Navy to seize the North Koreans as they attempted to run away after crossing into the South.

During an investigation, the North Koreans confessed that they and another crew member first killed the captain of the fishing boat in late October out of anger over his harsh treatment before killing the other protesting crew members one by one later, according to officials. 

They were also quoted as saying that all the bodies were dumped overboard.

They initially intended to return to North Korea and seek shelter. When the boat arrived at a North Korean port on its east coast, however, one was captured by local police, causing the other two to get scared and flee, the official said.

Yonhap

The top story in Korea that is headlining all its news outlets is the announcement that the Hwaseong Serial Killer has been identified after all these years:

Police may have solved one of the Korea’s most mysterious cold cases: the serial rapes and murders of nine women in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi, in the late 1980s.  

According to Ban Ki-soo, a chief investigator at the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency on Thursday, newly analyzed DNA evidence from three of the nine cases matched the DNA of a 56-year-old convict surnamed Lee currently serving a life sentence in Busan for a different murder he committed in 1994.  

This discovery could very well bring a resolution to one of the most notorious serial rape and murder sprees in Korean criminal history, which terrified Korea from 1986 to 1991 and remained unsolved for three decades.  

Yet the suspect, who was in his 20s at the time of the killings, can no longer be charged for any of those crimes since the statute of limitations for the last of the murders expired in April 2006. He has denied responsibility for all nine murders, police said.

Lee is serving a life sentence in the Busan Penitentiary for raping and murdering his wife’s sister, aged 20 at his home in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, in January 1994. According to press reports, he is a model prisoner with a taciturn personality who is eligible for parole.

A 10-victim rape and murder spree of the late 1980s and early 1990s terrified the nation — particularly due to the authorities’ inability to find a culprit — and was compared to the so-called Zodiac killings in California in the late 1960s. The killings gave rise to copycat crimes and inspired one of the most iconic blockbusters of Korean cinema, “Memories of Murder.” 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but here is a video report of the announcement from Arirang News:

The suspect could have likely been identified sooner if the investigators back when the crimes happened did not discard so much evidence such as cigarette butts found at the scene that would have much DNA evidence. Instead modern day forensic scientists using new technology were able to extract DNA from the victim’s clothes that were saved as evidence to make this DNA match.

For those that haven’t I highly recommend watching the Korean movie, Memories of Murder which uses a dramatized account of the investigation to show how incompetent it was and the killer’s impact on Korean society back then.

What I have not been able to find out is if the identified killer was even a suspect during the time of the killings? The police back then had many suspects that they were trying to pin the murder on, so it would be interesting to see if this guy was even on the police’s radar back then.

This is a chilling statistic to see on the increase which appears to be influenced by the poor economy:

Kim Sung-kwan, 37, had a habit of telling lies. 

He told his wife and his in-laws that he was working at a well-known company and was about to inherit a fortune from his grandfather, but in reality, he was relying on money from his mother.

Unable to deal with her son any longer, Kim’s mother drew a line and told Kim that she could not give him any more money. Kim grew furious with her and his family. He created a plan with his wife to murder his mother, stepbrother and stepfather.

“We can buy time to get away by killing everyone in the family,” Kim said to his wife.

Kim went to his parent’s house in Yongin, Gyeonggi, on Oct. 21, 2017, and killed his mother and stepbrother. To confuse police, he sprayed flour over the bodies and covered the bodies with a blanket.

“Two down, one to go,” read Kim’s message to his wife.

Later that day, Kim killed his stepfather and took 120 million won ($102,625) from his mother’s bank account. He fled to New Zealand with his wife and two children. Kim was arrested by New Zealand police and was extradited to Korea 80 days later.

Kim was sentenced to life in prison by a Korean court.

The number of crimes toward family members is on the rise, as the number of people arrested for the murder of a family member increased from 60 in 2015 to 91 in 2018, according to data from the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office. From January to April, 32 people have been arrested for killing a family member and experts estimate this number will surpass 100 by the end of the year. The number of people arrested for domestic violence increased from 988 in 2014 to 2,414 in 2018, doubling in just four years. Criminal psychology experts said that there are many cases where people take out their stress and anger on their families.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

On July 11, 2008 Pak Wang-Ja, a 53 yr-old wife/mom/tourist from SK, while out on a walk, was shot in the back & killed by NK guards at Mt. Geumgang resort in #NorthKorea, funded by SK's Hyundai, allegedly for having walked into a no-entry zone. NK never apologized. #Engagement

— Sung-Yoon Lee (@SungYoonLee1) July 10, 2019

A trip to Jeju that a man took to visit his daughter at his ex-wife’s house did not go very well:

Police have arrested a woman who allegedly murdered her ex-husband on Jeju Island and mutilated his body before discarding it in at least three locations across the nation. 

Ko Yoo-jung, 36, was apprehended at her house last Saturday in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province. 

The victim, surnamed Kang, 36, was meeting Ko on Jeju to see their six-year-old son for the first time in two years since she took custody after their divorce. Kang’s family reported him missing after he didn’t return.

Ko traveled to Wando from Jeju on a ferry three days after the alleged murder. She was caught on surveillance camera footage throwing a plastic bag into the ocean during her trip. 

She had purchased 30 trash bags and a suitcase from a supermarket about two hours before she left Jeju. 

Police suspected that she threw away a similar plastic bag near her father’s house in Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province. She returned to her house on May 31. 

Korea Times

This is an absolutely horrible crime:

A man in Jinju, southeastern South Korea, set his apartment aflame on Wednesday and attacked fleeing residents with a knife, killing five of them and injuring 13, police said.
The arson and murder suspect, identified only as a 42-year-old man, set fire to his apartment building in Jinju, about 435 kilometers southeast of Seoul, at around 4:29 a.m. before randomly stabbing other residents coming out of their houses to evacuate, police said.

Five residents, including a 12-year-old, were stabbed to death in the apartment stairways, and 13 others were injured, with three of them in critical condition, police said.
The suspect was detained on the scene at about 4:50 a.m. after a confrontation with police.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but condolences to all the victims’ families.