Raids on security bigwigs in murder, repatriation cases

Former National Intelligence Service directors Park Jie-won, left, and Suh Hoon emerge from their homes after they were raided by prosecutors on Tuesday. [YONHAP]

Prosecutors raided the homes of two high-ranking security officials from the Moon Jae-in administration over suspicions they suppressed evidence about North Korea's 2020 killing of a South Korean official in the Yellow Sea.

They also raided the home of former spy agency chief Suh Hoon over allegations he meddled in an inter-agency investigation into two North Korean fishermen who were forcibly repatriated by the South in November 2019.

Former spy agency chief Park Jie-won and former Defense Minister Suh Wook are the subjects of separate but related criminal complaints regarding their handling of the case of Lee Dae-jun, an official from the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries who disappeared while on duty just south of Yeonpyeong Island near the Northern Limit Line (NLL), which serves as the de facto inter-Korean maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea on Sept. 22, 2020.

The next day, North Korean soldiers found Lee, fatally shot him and burned his body over fear of Covid-19, according to South Korean defense officials. The North did not report a large-scale outbreak of that virus until last May.

Although the Korea Coast Guard initially said that Lee was killed in the process of defecting to the North to escape a gambling debt, the agency admitted at a June press conference held jointly with the Defense Ministry there was actually no evidence of that.

That reversal prompted Lee's relatives to file criminal complaints against former security officials they deemed responsible for framing Lee's death as a botched defection.

Park, who served as director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) from 2020 to 2022, faces allegations that he deleted information that contradicted the government's finding that Lee intended to defect – an act which would constitute abuse of authority and damaging public electronic records under the National Intelligence Service Act.

The prosecutors' raid on Park's home follows a criminal complaint filed against him by the NIS.

The NIS concluded through an internal agency investigation that Park ordered the deletion of intelligence reports that suggested Lee had drifted into North Korean waters instead of intentionally defecting.

Suh Wook, whose home was also raided, faces suspicions that he ordered the deletion of information obtained through the military's surveillance stations near the NLL, thus violating the Military Secret Protection Act.

According to defense and intelligence officials who have spoken on condition of anonymity to the JoongAng Ilbo, at least 40 South Korean military intelligence files detailing the events of Lee's capture and gruesome death, including a total of seven hours of recordings of North Korean military communications, were deleted from the Military Information Management System (MIMS).

The intelligence files disappeared from MIMS after two National Security Council meetings were held at the Blue House at 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. on September 23, the day after Lee's murder.

A military official who spoke to the JoongAng Ilbo said it was unusual that original intercepts of North Korean military communications would be deleted so soon after they were gathered.

"Original files of information gathered through surveillance have a [mandatory] retention period because local surveillance units often refer to earlier data," he said.

"It is very rare to delete [such files] early in violation of this rule," he added.

The home of Suh Hoon, who was NIS director from 2017 to 2020, was also raided by prosecutors after the NIS filed a complaint that he prematurely terminated an inter-agency investigation into Seoul’s repatriation of two North Korean fishermen in 2019 and fabricated documents in relation to the case.

That investigation concluded that the two sailors killed the captain of their fishing vessel boat and 15 fellow crew members.

The repatriation provoked criticism from defector groups in the South and international human rights organizations, who said the pair were branded as criminals without due process.

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