This photo, taken on July 19, 2016, shows a pistol and bullets that the Busan Police Agency has confiscated from a high-ranking member of a major yakuza group known as Kudo-kai. The member smuggled himself into South Korea in January 2015 before being apprehended by police on July 7. The Kudo-kai crime syndicate is based in Kitakyushu, Japan’s Fukuoka Prefecture.(Yonhap)
This is a pretty big bust of street racers in the Seoul area:
Seoul police announced Thursday that they have rounded up 73 people involved in racing their luxury cars on public roads during the wee hours of the night.
From May 2015 to May of this year, police found 73 people who participated in 22-kilometer (13.6-mile) races from the Jangam Station in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi, to the Songchu three-way intersection and back.
The racers were grouped into twos and threes by the horsepower of their cars, and as many as 10 to 15 such groups participated in the midnight race from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m., according to police.
The participants drove at about 60 kilometers-per-hour until they hit the Sapaesan Tunnel, a 4-kilometer-long four-lane tunnel, where they reached speeds of 200 to 324 kilometers per hour. The speed limit in the tunnel is 100 kilometers per hour.
Some motor service center owners helped racers tweak the electronic control unit of their cars in order to allow extreme speeding. Police said some of them received roughly 3 million won ($2,649) per car.
Among the 73 drivers booked by police, only one was a woman.
All 73 face the charge of violating the Road Traffic Act and five have been arrested for being chief organizers of the races. Six men were found to have raced at least 100 times since May of last year. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Considering the age of consent in South Korea the only way these two could be charged with a crime is if these teenagers were coerced into the relationships. Considering the position of authority of a police officer you would think this would be coercive:
Two policemen in Busan resigned after it was found they had sex with high school students they were in charge of monitoring, but they faced no punishment and even received their severance pay.
One policeman surnamed Kim, 33, had sex with a 17-year-old high school student he was supposed to look after and guide, inside a car after school on June 4.
The case came to light as the student reported what had happend to the school nurse, who then alerted a female officer who was managing students at another school, who then passed the case to Busan Saha Police Station.
The Saha Police Station’s section chief verified and confirmed the facts with Kim and the school, however, closed the case without reporting to higher authorities by advising Kim to resign.
Kim handed in his notice the next day, on June 9, saying he had “decided to continue his parents’ business.” He received no punishment and received his severance pay.
When the case belatedly erupted over social media on Friday, the section chief denied having had any knowledge of the incident prior to Kim’s resignation.
A 31-year-old police officer at Busan Yeonje Police Station also had a sexual relationship with a high school student he was supervising. The teenager reportedly contemplated taking her life after the incident. Whether the two had sex more than once is yet to be confirmed.
The case was discovered by a teenagers’ welfare organization that had had a consultation session with the student. When the organization attempted to verify the case with Jeong, he filed for resignation from his post on May 17, claiming that being a police officer did not “fit his aptitude.” [Korea Herald]
Here is a general safety note to everyone, do not let strange people into your apartment that you just met in the elevator:
The 36-year-old sex offender arrested last Saturday for allegedly murdering a 60-year-old woman in Gaepo-dong, southern Seoul, did not know his victim as he claimed.
Police now say he stalked a complete stranger, sneaked into her house to rape her and then killed her so he wouldn’t get caught.
After his arrest on June 18, the suspect, surnamed Kim, claimed he met the victim while working at a real estate agency and had known her for about a month. He told police he asked her to lend him money and murdered her when she refused.
But investigators found no record of calls or texts between the two.
Under questioning, Kim changed his story. According to police, Kim saw the victim in a parking lot on June 14, two days before the murder. Security camera footage caught him in the same parking lot as the victim.
He tailed her as she drove to her residence because he wanted to develop a “good relationship” with her, Kim said, according to police. He followed her into the apartment building elevator and introduced himself as an insurance salesman, a profession he had started to study.
He asked to come inside her apartment to tell her about policies and she agreed. When she punched the code into the security keypad of her apartment, he noted the combination of numbers. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but this guy was out on parole after being jailed for 10 years for a prior sexual assault and was forced to wear an ankle bracelet. However, it broke and no one was tracking him when he committed the crime.
Here is a strange story of a Korean movie director who broke a promise to an actress to not release a topless scene in the movie and now is facing a sexual violence crime for not keeping that promise:
Kwak Hyun-hwa, left, and Lee Soo-sung
Prosecutors have indicted film director Lee Soo-sung for allegedly releasing a “director’s cut” of an adult movie without agreeing with the actress who was nude in it.
The Seoul Central District Court has charged Lee with infringing the sexual violence crime punishment laws and making a false charge in his counter-accusation against Kwak Hyun-hwa, the actress.
Kwak, who starred in Lee’s movie “House With a Good View” in 2012, did not want to be part of any nude scene. Lee persuaded her that he would consider cutting out such scenes when editing the film and insisted she go topless, to which she agreed. [Korea Times]
Here is an update on the aftermath of the Gangnam murder case:
Korea on Wednesday unveiled a series of measures aimed at creating a more equal society for women, about a month after a woman was killed by a stranger in a high-traffic neighborhood in Seoul.
The murder sent a shockwave through a nation that has made strides in recent years but apparently leaves much to be desired in areas of gender equality.
The measures announced Wednesday focus on preventing hate crimes against women, better protecting victims of such crimes and raising awareness for gender equality in the country, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said. It held ministerial-level talks with the Ministry of Education and the National Police Agency.
The measures are a follow-up to the first batch announced earlier this month when Korea decided to seek the maximum default sentence for hate crimes against women and actively appeal sentences that fall short. [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but the murder of the young Korean woman in Gangnam reminds me so much of the Orlando shooting debate. The scale of the two murders is no where near the same, but both led to false national debates. For the Orlando shooting the debate has centered on banning so called “assault rifles” though no one has shown any evidence the terrorist would not have shot up that night club if every AR-15 in the country was confiscated. The real problem appears to be once again a person with a history of mental trouble that was easily influenced by radical Islamic extremism.
In the Gangman murder the national debate in Korea has been about hate crimes against women when the murderer for years was in and out of mental hospitals and became homeless because his family could no longer handle caring for him due to his mental illness. In my opinion the national debate to respond to both murder incidents does not address the core problems, but instead have been hijacked by activists to push pet political causes.
Even in the worst of times of US-ROK relations during the Roh Moo-hyun administration years there was never government officials driving around with blue lights on their cars looking to harass US servicemembers like what is currently happening in Okinawa:
Japanese officials are patrolling areas in southwestern Okinawa in an effort to prevent crimes near U.S. military bases and entertainment districts.
The team, composed of about 40 staff members from Okinawa government agencies, was created after a former Marine working at Kadena Air Base was arrested May 19 in connection with the death of a 20-year-old Okinawan woman, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported Wednesday.
The patrol vehicles, which use blue rotating lights, are on the streets between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., the report said. The number of police officers patrolling the island prefecture is also expected to increase. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read the rest at the link, but this looks like pure political theater. Some government official driving around with a blue light would have done nothing to prevent the tragic murder of Ms. Shimabukuro.
Despite being convicted of embezzling nearly a million dollars, the CEO of the largest foreign language business in South Korea, Pagoda has received no jail time with her entire sentence being suspended:
Park Kyung-sil
PAGODA Academy CEO Park Kyung-sil was found guilty of embezzlement and breach of trust, an appellate court said Tuesday.
The Seoul High Court sentenced the 61-year-old leader of Korea’s major foreign language institute to two-years-and-six months in prison with the term suspended for three years.
The ruling was made after the court reviewed the case at the request of the Supreme Court, which found faults with the grounds for the appellate court’s ruling.
Park was indicted in 2013 on charges of pocketing one billion won ($849,000) in corporate money and inflicting losses of 53 billion won on the company by mismanagement. She pled guilty to the embezzlement charge. [Korea Times]
The arrest of the three men accused of gang raping a Korean teacher on the remote Korean island Heuksan-do has finally happened. Due to the public outrage it appears the Korean police are not going to give the perpetrators the benefit of using the “I was drunk excuse” so commonly used in these cases:
Three suspects have been charged with premeditated rape and assault in the investigation of a sexual assault case involving a female teacher in her 20s by three local men from Heuksan Island in Sinan County, South Jeolla.
The three suspects were scheduled to be sent to the prosecution today for further investigation. Each is a father of children in kindergarten, elementary or middle school. The children of two of the suspects are attending the school where the victim worked. They were arrested by police last Saturday, after the victim reported the crime.
One of the suspects, surnamed Park, 49, owns the restaurant where the teacher was having dinner prior to the crime on May 21. He and one other suspect, Lee, 34, are accused of having invited the teacher to join them and getting her drunk.
After the victim became intoxicated, Park brought her to a building at an elementary school at 11:00 p.m in his car while Lee followed. About 30 minutes later, police say, the other suspect, Kim, 38, drove to the elementary school building, as well.
The police initially planned to impose less severe charges on the three since they claimed the rape was not planned.
“The testimonies of the three suspects didn’t match,” said a police officer. “They seemed to have lied when they said the crime was not plotted.”
But given that the three suspects live in the same neighborhood, contacted each other before and after the crime and went inside the building and raped the victim in sequence, the police charged them with premeditated rape. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link. Also for those wondering where Heuksan-do island is located at here is a Google Map of its location:
Incredibly the arrest of one of the suspects surnamed Kim has been linked to a 2007 rape in Daejon. The DNA found on the teacher matched the DNA found on the victim in the Daejon case. Due to the victim speaking out about this rape she may have gotten a serial rapist off the streets. It seems like if someone wanted to lie low and hide out somewhere Heuksando would be a place to go.
