Prosecutors, then police: Jang Yun-gi probe closes in on top command

Police investigators probing alleged misconduct in the Jang Yun-gi case — in which Jang attempted to rape and then killed a high school student in Gwangju — have turned their attention to the command chain within the Korean National Police Agency's National Investigation Headquarters.

The National Investigation Headquarters' special investigation unit said it summoned Chief Inspector Choi, head of the violent crimes division, and others as witnesses starting at 10 a.m. Thursday. Choi had also been questioned as a witness by the Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office on Wednesday as part of its separate investigation into allegations that police buried the Jang Yun-gi probe.

Choi is suspected of relaying an order from then-National Investigation Headquarters chief Park Seong-ju to the investigative team at Gwangju's Gwangsan Police Station, directing them to treat the murder and a separate sexual assault that occurred just before it as distinct cases.

With National Investigation Headquarters officials now being questioned over their alleged role in passing down that order, investigators are expected to soon summon former headquarters chief Park, identified as the top of the chain of command behind the directive.

The National Investigation Headquarters issued a directive in April to all provincial and metropolitan police agencies requiring that related crimes be investigated jointly. If the allegations prove true, the headquarters effectively violated its own policy in the Jang case by ordering investigators to handle only the murder separately. The Gwangsan station had received a stalking complaint against Jang involving a different female victim two days before he killed the high school student, and had sent him a warning text message.

The central allegation in the Jang Yun-gi case is that police colluded with Jang's father — a senior Gwangju police officer identified by the surname Jang, holding the rank of inspector — to forward the case to prosecutors with only a murder charge, deliberately excluding the sexual assault allegations. This came to light after prosecutors took over the case and conducted a supplementary investigation. The Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office found evidence suggesting the Gwangsan station's investigative team had discovered evidence of Jang Yun-gi's rape charges but failed to secure it, while leaking real-time investigative information to Inspector Jang. The office subsequently indicted Jang Yun-gi on charges of rape-murder.

The officers who investigated Jang Yun-gi have maintained that they separated the murder and sexual assault investigations on orders from the National Investigation Headquarters. The defense attorney for Chief Inspector Park, who served as head of the criminal investigations division at Gwangsan station, told reporters immediately after a pre-detention hearing Tuesday that his client "had determined that the sexual assault case needed to be consolidated with the murder to establish whether the killing was committed for the purpose of sexual assault, and requested the National Investigation Headquarters to merge the cases — but was refused."

In response, an official from the National Investigation Headquarters' violent crimes investigation division acknowledged Tuesday that the unit had "instructed the investigative team to forward the murder case first to ensure investigative completeness," but added that "there were no instructions from the National Investigation Headquarters regarding the determination of charges by the investigative team."

The special investigation unit also summoned Chief Superintendent Kim, who served as chief of Gwangsan Police Station during the Jang Yun-gi investigation, as a suspect Thursday. Kim is suspected of directing investigators to forward the case as a murder rather than a rape-murder, allegedly saying the case should be handled so that "talk of related crimes does not come up as much as possible."