Officer who falsely closed missing-person cases tried to track victim's phone after new report came in

A Jeju police officer detained on charges of falsely closing missing-person cases attempted to track the phone of Jang Mi-ran, 37, four times after a new report on her disappearance was filed last month, according to documents submitted to a lawmaker.

The Jeju Provincial Police Agency submitted the records to People Power Party lawmaker Park Sang-ung. The documents showed that the officer — identified by his rank as a senior patrol officer surnamed Bu — queried Jang's phone location from 5:16 p.m. on July 20 to around 2:20 p.m. on July 21. Jang's disappearance had been reported again on July 19, and Bu was assigned to the search.

All four location queries failed because Jang's phone had been switched off since May 16 — four days after she went missing on the night of May 12.

Earlier, when the initial missing-person report was filed around 6:43 p.m. on May 15, Bu had also queried Jang's location seven times between approximately 7:08 p.m. and 8:55 p.m. that day. Records of those queries were deleted around Aug. 15, when the three-month retention period for personal location data expired.

About two and a half hours after the initial report, Bu falsely closed the case, claiming he had reached Jang by phone. He then deleted her entry from the missing-persons profiling system, entering a code for "traffic accident casualty" as the reason, investigators found.

Bu was arrested on an emergency basis on Saturday on charges of dereliction of duty, forgery and use of official electronic records, and obstruction of official duties by deception. A court accepted his habeas corpus petition and he was released Monday, but Jeju District Court issued an arrest warrant the following day, Tuesday, citing concerns about flight risk and destruction of evidence.

Bu also faces charges of falsely closing a separate missing-person case involving a man in his 60s, again claiming contact had been made. That man was found dead the day after his family filed a new report.

Police are conducting a full review of 298 missing-person cases Bu handled. About 10 are believed to have been potentially falsely closed, and at least three involve missing persons who have not been reached, sources said.