Blue House bigwigs blamed in Yellow Sea murder cover-up

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Blue House bigwigs blamed in Yellow Sea murder cover-up

Kwon Young-mi, widow of Lee Dae-joon, a South Korean fisheries official shot dead by North Korea after his disappearance while on duty near the inter-Korean maritime border in the Yellow Sea, cries at a press conference in Seoul on Friday. [YONHAP]

Kwon Young-mi, widow of Lee Dae-joon, a South Korean fisheries official shot dead by North Korea after his disappearance while on duty near the inter-Korean maritime border in the Yellow Sea, cries at a press conference in Seoul on Friday. [YONHAP]

 
The family of a South Korean fisheries official killed by North Korean soldiers in 2020 intend to file criminal complaints against high-ranking members of the Moon Jae-in administration for allegedly forcing the Korea Coast Guard to say he was trying to defect.
 
The Blue House officials in their crosshairs are Suh Hoon, former National Security Office chief, Kim Jong-ho, former senior secretary to the president for civil affairs, and Lee Kwang-cheol, former civil affairs secretary.
 
The family's decision came after the Defense Ministry and Coast Guard admitted at a joint press briefing last Thursday that there was no evidence that the 47-year-old Lee Dae-joon, an official at the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, was trying to defect on Sept. 22, 2020 while on duty near Yeonpyeong Island in waters south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border in the Yellow Sea.
 
Lee somehow drifted across the NLL and was shot dead by North Korean soldiers upon capture. Seoul’s defense ministry said his killers burnt his corpse out of fear of possible Covid-19 contamination. Pyongyang claimed its soldiers only burnt his belongings.
 
Lee’s family said they will file a criminal complaint on Wednesday with the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office against the three former Blue House officials, accusing them of obstructing the Coast Guard from properly carrying out its duties by instructing it to base its investigation on the idea that Lee was trying to defect — a conclusion the agency did come to in its report on his gruesome death.
 
In an interview with Channel A on Saturday, Lee’s widow Kwon Young-mi spoke of the shame of being labelled the family of an alleged defector to North Korea.  
 
“Because the state branded us the family of a defector, we hardly left the house unless there was a special occasion,” Kwon said.
 
Kwon said she decided to file a criminal complaint against the former Blue House officials after reading a statement made by her husband’s colleague, which seemed to contradict the Coast Guard’s finding that Lee intended to defect.
 
In the statement, the colleague wrote, “To defect North, Lee would have had to wear a diving suit, but he left it in his room.”
 
He added, “The current at the time [of his disappearance] was flowing east, so I don’t think it’s possible to go north against the flow.”
 
The South Korean government denounced the killing of Lee, prompting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to issue a rare apology for the fatal shooting on Sept. 25, 2020.
 
The Moon administration however said Lee had been killed in the process of “voluntarily” attempting to defect to North Korea out of panic over a gambling debt, and that the North Koreans seemed to have killed and burned him out of fear of Covid-19 infection.  
 
A high-ranking official in the current presidential office told the JoongAng Ilbo on Sunday that Moon administration officials’ alleged instructions to the Coast Guard amounted to a “cover-up” even as “the burning to death of a South Korean was basically broadcast live.”
 
While Moon mentioned the incident as an important reason for restoring an inter-Korean communication line, his administration did not request an official explanation from the North regarding the circumstances of Lee’s murder even after the line was reopened in late July 2021, according to his brother Lee Rae-jin. Lee contacted the Unification Ministry several times for confirmation that Seoul sought an explanation, but never received one. 
 
Aside from the Coast Guard’s report, the Moon administration also did not disclose any documents that could explain the circumstances of the incident, saying they would endanger military intelligence assets.  
 
The documents are now part of presidential records, which are normally sealed for 30 years, while other related documents from the National Security Office are sealed for 15 years.
 
For such records to be made public, the National Assembly — currently controlled by the former president’s liberal Democratic Party (DP) — must approve their disclosure by a two-thirds vote. Another way would be by an order from the chief judge of the Seoul High Court.
 
People Power Party (PPP) floor leader Kwon Seong-dong blasted the DP over the issue in a Facebook post over the weekend, accusing it of turning its back on justice and human rights on issues where its own members and North Korea is concerned.
 
The PPP has set up a task force to investigate the death of the fisheries official.
 
The DP responded by saying the PPP is taking a McCarthyistic approach to the incident and imperiling the country’s intelligence assets.
 
“If [the PPP] intends to compromise our intelligence network, we should indeed hold a vote [to unseal records of the incident],” the DP’s interim leader Woo Sang-ho said during a press conference at the National Assembly on Sunday.
 
Woo also suggested on Friday that the question of whether Lee intended to defect or not was a moot one because North Korean leader Kim had apologized, and that bread-and-butter issues related to rising inflation and cost of living should take priority.
 

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]
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