Former Blue House official arrested for North killing cover-up

Former President Moon Jae-in and then-National Security Office Director Suh Hoon at a meeting at the Blue House in February 2021. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

Former national security advisor Suh Hoon was arrested Saturday on suspicion of destroying evidence and engaging in a cover-up in the case of a fisheries official killed by North Korean troops.

The Seoul Central District Court granted prosecutors an arrest warrant to detain Suh after a marathon 10 hour-long review session, citing the “gravity of the crime, the rank held by the suspect, ties between officials involved in the case and corresponding concerns that more evidence could be destroyed” as the reason for approving the prosecution’s warrant application.

Suh is accused of abuse of power by ordering the suppression of information on Lee’s murder — specifically South Korean military intelligence reports gathered through surveillance of North Korean communications — and falsifying documents by directing the Defense Ministry, National Intelligence Service and the Korea Coast Guard to report that Lee was killed in the process of voluntarily defecting to North Korea.

During his warrant review, Suh denied the charge that he intentionally suppressed evidence that ran counter to the initial official conclusion about Lee’s killing, arguing that his compilation and assessment of various surveillance reports was a “policy decision” beyond the purview of the judicial system.

Lee, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances on Sept 21, 2020 while on duty south of Yeonpyeong Island near the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border, in the Yellow Sea, was fatally shot the following day by North Korean soldiers, who burned his corpse after the murder.

Soon after, South Korean military officials and the Coast Guard issued a finding that the North Koreans burned Lee's body out of Covid-19 fears. They also claimed that Lee tried to escape the South due to a hefty gambling debt.

But in June, the Ministry of National Defense and the Coast Guard under the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol administration said in a press conference that there was no evidence to support the claim that Lee was trying to defect.

Yoon’s administration has seized on Lee’s murder, as well as the forced repatriation of two North Korean fishermen in November 2019, as instances where the Moon Jae-in administration avoided demanding accountability from Pyongyang or even sought to curry favor in order to avoid damaging ties.

Suh was director of the Blue House National Security Office (NSO) from July 2020 to May this year, and is the highest-ranking official from the Moon administration to be arrested.

His arrest sparked criticism against the Yoon administration from Moon on Sunday, who characterized it as an act of national self-harm.

“Suh participated in all negotiations with North Korea under former presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun as well as myself, and he is the foremost North Korea expert, strategist and negotiator,” Moon said.

The former president had also issued a statement through Democratic Party spokesman Youn Kun-young on Thursday that emphasized that he himself had been the “final authority” to sign off on reports from the Defense Ministry, Coast Guard and National Intelligence Service, and called the prosecution of a high-ranking former official such as Suh as tantamount to “trampling on the dignity of public servants who sacrificed themselves for so long to the cause of national security” and “destroying security institutions without regard for the consequences.”

Moon also criticized the prosecution for presenting “no new evidence” to support its assertion that Lee was not, in fact, trying to defect to the North when he was murdered.

He said that the prosecution should offer other reasons why Lee ended up in North Korean waters.

“Instead of doing so, all they have done is to criticize the previous findings as having been fabricated,” Moon said.

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