Police official at Blue House is said to have begun cover-up

A police officer dispatched from the Blue House initiated the cover-up of a robbery at the home of a man suspected of collaborating with an aide of President Kim Dae-jung in a bribery incident, the national police said yesterday.
Captain Park Jong-i, who worked at the Blue House at the time of the robbery in 2002, was named in an internal police probe as the man who started the cover-up.
He is said to be a friend of Park Jie-won, one of Mr. Kim’s senior aides and the subject of bribery allegations that surfaced during the cash-for-summit investigation by an independent counsel.
Kim Yeong-wan, the victim of the robbery, is suspected of having been laundering the 15 billion won ($12.5 million) that Hyundai Group allegedly gave Mr. Park.
Mr. Kim, 50, is a former arms dealer and is currently in the United States. The robbery, which took place March 2002, was not made public for 15 months. Police say Mr. Kim’s driver was part of a plot to rob him of 10 billion won he was keeping in his home ― money that the driver allegedly assured his accomplices was illicit and the loss of which was not likely to be reported.
According to the results of the internal police investigation, Mr. Kim consulted with Captain Park quickly after the robbery took place. The two had known each other for about a year, police said. Captain Park allegedly asked Lee Seung-jai, the crime investigation bureau chief at the National Police Agency, to recommend someone who could quietly investigate the case and ordered it to be kept secret.
That order, police said, bypassed the official reporting channels; they said they would press charges against officers who failed to use the official systems.
Mr. Kim, the police report said, also traveled in March and April 2000 to the same foreign destinations where Mr. Park, Hyundai Asan Chairman Chung Mong-hun and Lee Ik-chi, a former head of Hyundai Securities, were meeting North Korean officials to arrange the June 2000 inter-Korean summit.
Mr. Kim’s travels noted in his passport reportedly match the dates and destinations ― Singapore and China ― of the other men’s four negotiating trips.
When it applied for a detention warrant against Mr. Park last week, the independent counsel said that in early April 2000, Mr. Park demanded through Mr. Kim that Mr. Chung pay 15 billion won to him for expenses involved in preparing for the summit.
The demand was made before April 10, when the inter-Korean summit was announced, suggesting that Mr. Kim was privy to the negotiations.

by Won Nak-yon, Jeon Jin-bae