Teen’s assault on video stuns Net users here

ANSAN, Gyeonggi ― Police requested a detention warrant for a 16-year-old middle school girl and opened an investigation of three other girls in their teens on charges of assaulting another girl of about the same age.
The assault was filmed by one of the assailants with a cell phone camera and spread over the Internet on Thursday, Ansan police said yesterday.
Based on the testament of the victim, a 16-year-old classmate of the suspects, police questioned the four girls yesterday, they added.
The group allegedly took the victim to an apartment of one of the suspects on Dec. 8 and held her there from 12 to 4 p.m., beating her nearly continuously.
The leader of the gang told police that the group assaulted the girl because they thought she had spread rumors that caused the leader’s boyfriend to break off their relationship. The victim denied that claim, police said.
“Two members of the gang beat her up and the other two videotaped the scene with a cell phone camera to show it to other friends,” a police official said. “One of the gang sent the clip to another friend, who allegedly edited and posted the clip on the Internet.”
Police said they would also question the person who posted the clip on the Internet.
The video clip, about four minutes long, was posted at the Web site Pandora TV and was widely copied and posted elsewhere on Korean video sites.
The clip begins with a girl removing the victim’s glasses and hitting her on the back of the head.
The victim begged for mercy to no avail; the suspects pulled her hair, slapped her in the face and forced her to look at the camera.
The victim sobbed and apologized to the suspects while kneeling before them, but the assault continued, with the assailants joking with each other and one humming a song during the victim’s ordeal. As the clip ended, the gang was attempting to remove the girl’s school uniform jacket and blouse.
Internet users were shocked and enraged, many calling for harsh punishment for the culprits. Some became detectives themselves and searched for the suspects’ identities. One poster said the assailants were students at her school.
The victim’s mother reported the incident to police on Thursday afternoon. The girl was hospitalized, suffering from shock and stress, after the clip began circulating on the Internet, police said.

by Chung Young-jin,Kim Soe-jung