Turning Up the Heat

The opposition party's efforts to have a special prosecutor named to investigate the illegal loan and bribery scandal gained new force Friday in the wake of two developments.

On Thursday, the Seoul District Court sided with a special prosecutor's investigation into the Furgate scandal that rocked Korea last year.

The court found Bae Jung-sook, the wife of a former unification minister; Yeon Jung-hee, the wife of former prosecutor-general, and Chung Il-soon, an owner of a fashion boutique, guilty of giving false testimony.

Last year, the prosecution, then headed by Kim Tae-joung, Mrs. Yeon's husband, had decided not to pursue the cases. The special prosecutor thought otherwise.

"The court ruling shows that politically sensitive cases cannot be entrusted to the prosecution," Lee Hoi-chang Friday, the president of the opposition party, said Friday.

The opposition party also cited the announcement Fri-day regarding a Blue House janitor's role in the scandal as further evidence of the need for a special prosecutor to in-vestigate what is going on. The janitor allegedly extorted 160 million won ($145,450) from Chung Hyun-joon, a central figure in the scandal.

"If a low-level Blue House employee can extort such an amount in exchange for merely promising to do something for Mr. Chung, then obviously the amount in kickback given to ruling party insiders must be astronomical," said Represen-tative Kwon Chul-hyeon, a spokesman for the opposition party.

The ruling party denied Mr. Kwon's charges and said that that Mr. Chung would not have been deceived by a low-level janitor if he really had ties to top ruling party insiders.

by Chun Young-gi