Moon's former chief of staff grilled about murder at sea

Former Blue House Chief of Staff Noh Young-min, right, speaks in a press conference on the death of a fisheries official in 2020 at the National Assembly in Yeouido, western Seoul. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

Prosecutors grilled Noh Young-min, a former presidential chief of staff, in their investigation into the murder at sea of a South Korean fisheries official by North Korean soldiers in 2020.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office summoned Noh Tuesday as a suspect in its probe into how the Moon Jae-in government came to the conclusion that the 47-year-old fisheries official, Lee Dae-jun, was trying to defect to North Korea.

Noh served as chief of staff to President Moon from January 2019 to December 2020.

He attended an emergency ministers' meeting at 1:00 a.m. on Sept. 23, 2020, a day after Lee's murder.

Prosecutors claim that Noh and Suh Hoon, director of the Blue House National Security Office (NSO), reported Lee's death to the president at 8:30 a.m. that day for the first time.

At that time, Moon told aides that the public would be "outraged" if the news was true and ordered them to "find out the facts and inform the people exactly what happened."

Noh also attended a ministers' meeting on Sept. 27 presided over by Moon.

Prosecutors were expected to question Noh on any instructions he received at meetings related to the fisheries official's death and if there was an attempt to cover up the case or to promote the idea that he had been trying to "voluntarily" defect to the North, and if Noh had any involvement in that.

On Sept. 22, 2020, North Korean soldiers fatally shot Lee and burned his corpse. The previous day, he disappeared while on duty south of Yeonpyeong Island near the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border, in the Yellow Sea. At the time, South Korean military officials claimed that Lee was trying to escape gambling debts by defecting to North Korea.

After it came into power last May, the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, its Ministry of National Defense and the Coast Guard admitted there was no evidence to support the idea that Lee was trying to defect.

Last Friday, former national security adviser Suh was indicted for abuse of power and fabricating evidence about Lee's death.

The prosecution will summon Park Jie-won, former chief of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), on Wednesday for questioning in the case. Park has been accused of deleting intelligence reports related to Lee's death.

According to an investigation led by the Board of Audit and Inspection, after the Sept. 23, 2020 ministers' meeting, the NIS deleted 46 documents including intelligence reports related to the case. Prosecutors suspect that Park was instructed by Suh to delete the NIS documents.

In a press conference on Oct. 27, Noh, Suh and Park rejected the Yoon government's allegations that they tampered with evidence to falsely portray Lee as a defector.

In a separate case, prosecutors also summoned Noh in October for questioning about his role in the government's 2019 decision to repatriate two North Korean fishermen caught on the South Korean side of the East Sea.

He was suspected of having intervened in the case to push for the fishermen's deportation back to the North against their wishes.

Earlier this month, prosecutors imposed a travel ban on Noh for his alleged involvement in a hiring scandal.

In that case, prosecutors are investigating allegations that a freight terminal operator, Korea Integrated Freight Terminal Co., hired Lee Jung-geun, a former deputy secretary general of the liberal Democratic Party (DP), as a full-time advisor from 2020 to 2021 at the request of Noh. The freight operator is owned by CJ Logistics and its business is operated on land owned by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

BY SARAH KIM [kim.sarah@joongang.co.kr]