Exclusive: Key suspect in Gangjin elementary school disappearances rearrested a month after release

A man in his 40s who had been named a prime suspect in the unsolved serial disappearances of elementary school girls in Gangjin — a cold case now in its 26th year — has been rearrested just over a month after his release from prison. The man has prior convictions for murder and the sexual assault of a woman with an intellectual disability, for which he received sentences of 15 years and eight years respectively.

The man, identified only as Ma, 47, was taken into custody Friday and is being held at Seoul Eastern Detention Center. Ma had been released from prison Sept. 8 after completing his sentence and had been living under electronic monitoring with an ankle bracelet at a temporary residence in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul.

After his release, the Ministry of Justice ordered Ma not to possess any bladed weapons. When a probation office received intelligence that he had recently obtained and was carrying such a weapon, officers searched his residence, determined there were sufficient grounds for charges, made an emergency arrest and applied to prosecutors for an arrest warrant.

News of Ma's release alarmed residents in the area, given his history of violent crime. As his past offenses were covered by various broadcast programs, residents filed complaints with the district office and police, demanding that he be relocated or arrested.

Police classified Ma as a subject requiring special monitoring and deployed mobile units to conduct intensive patrols around residential neighborhoods and elementary schools in Dongdaemun-gu.

Ma had been named a prime suspect in the disappearances of two elementary school girls in Gangjin, South Jeolla Province, in 2000 and 2001. During a 2010 investigation, he confessed to killing and disposing of the two children and participated in a crime scene reconstruction, but later recanted his statements. Without direct physical evidence, he was never indicted or punished in connection with those cases. The SBS investigative program "Geugeosi Algo Sipda" recently revisited the still-unresolved case.

In 2002, Ma was sentenced to 15 years in prison for stabbing and killing his brother-in-law, who had opposed a reconciliation during divorce proceedings, and was released in 2017. He was subsequently tried again on charges of sexually assaulting a woman in her 40s with a third-degree intellectual disability, whom he had approached in 2018, and filing a false marriage registration, among other charges. He served eight years for those offenses before being released last month.