4 more bags of human remains found in Suwon

Police found four black plastic bags containing mutilated human body parts on Thursday in Suwon, southern Gyeonggi, during an investigation prompted by the discovery earlier this month of a headless, limbless human torso found along a hiking trail there.

According to the Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency, the four black plastic bags were found in the area along the Suwon Stream between Maesae Bridge and Secheon Bridge.

Each of the bags contained boneless flesh and internal organs, police said, and blood tests verified they were human remains.

According to authorities, the bags were scattered in four different places within 100 meters (308 feet) of one another and the bags were left untied.

The search was prompted by the discovery on Dec. 5 of a bag containing an upper torso of a human body on a nearby mountain hiking trail. The police said it had sent the additional body parts to the National Forensic Service to determine if they belonged to the same person.

If the National Forensic Service concludes that the other body parts were from a different individual or mulitple victims, the police will expand its investigation and likely treat the case as a serial murder.

Maese Bridge, located near the site where the four bags were discovered, is about 700 meters away from the mountain where the human torso was first found by a hiker. The Gyeonggi police announced Thursday that it will provide 50 million won ($45,488) in return for any information that could lead to the arrest of a suspect.

The National Forensic Service has already examined the remains from earlier this month and concluded that the victim was a post-adolescent female with Type A blood.

The cause of death, the victim’s age and the time of her death, however, were not determined.

So far, investigators have determined that the body was mutilated after the victim had died. A toxicology report came back negative, ruling out a possible poisoning. The National Forensic Service has obtained a DNA sample from the torso and the police are running a database search of missing women to identify the victim.

The areas where the body parts were discovered is only 1.3 kilometers from a residential area where a 28-year-old woman was brutally raped, murdered and dismembered in 2012.

BY SER MYO-JA [myoja@joongang.co.kr ]