Police probe into missing-persons cases gutted as records of closed files prove unrecoverable

A nationwide review of missing-persons cases that were deleted or never entered into police databases has been effectively rendered meaningless after authorities confirmed that records of cases closed as deaths are permanently erased and cannot be recovered.

The review was launched after it emerged that a Jeju officer had arbitrarily marked a missing person as deceased without verifying whether she was alive and then concealed the case.

The Korean National Police Agency told the office of People Power Party lawmaker Park Seong-ung of the National Assembly's Interior and Safety Committee on Friday that "when a missing person is closed as deceased, the data is deleted from the system and cannot be retrieved."

The agency gave the same response to Assembly questions asking for the names of officers who handled such cases, the police stations involved, case registration dates, and any records of people later found alive or re-reported after being closed as deceased — saying only that "the data is deleted from the system upon a death closure and cannot be produced."

Critics say the investigation has lost its practical value, as police can no longer determine the full scale of deleted records or establish who closed which cases as deaths and under what circumstances.

In the Jeju case, the deletion of records was confirmed through the suspect's own admission. Corporal Bu (34), assigned to the Jeju Western Police Station's missing-persons unit, faces charges of falsely closing the case of Jang Mi-ran, 37, who disappeared and was later found dead. A Jeju Provincial Police Agency official said at a press briefing Tuesday that when investigators presented Bu with phone records and other evidence, "he admitted that he had entered false information into the system, deleted the records, and closed the case."

According to the police investigation, Bu entered Jang's case into the system as a "traffic accident death" roughly two and a half hours after receiving the missing-persons report, closing it without conducting any proper search. Jang was effectively removed from the police-managed list of missing persons with no search effort. Bu told the person who filed the report that he had spoken with Jang and that she had refused to disclose her location.

During Bu's one year and four months in the missing-persons unit at Jeju Western Station, he single-handedly closed 298 missing-persons cases. Of those, 235 still had records in the system. The remaining 63 — including Jang's case — had either been deleted or were never entered.

Police conducting a nationwide review that covers cases handled by Bu said no additional problematic cases have been identified so far. A Korean National Police Agency official said at a regular press briefing Monday that investigators had reviewed more than 15,100 cases between Aug. 24, when the comprehensive review was ordered, and Aug. 28, and that "no cases with problems have been reported so far."

Police have pledged a sweeping overhaul of how missing-persons cases are handled. Kim Jong-cheol, the newly appointed acting commissioner general of the Korean National Police Agency, traveled to Jeju on Thursday — his first day in the role — to meet with the family of a man in his 60s who was the victim of another missing-persons case Bu had concealed. Kim said the handling of the investigation "led to irreversible consequences for the lives of the people police are meant to protect," and vowed to "rebuild from the ground up, as if constructing a new house," across all areas of police work, including missing-persons cases.