Police Officer Released After Falsely Closing Missing Persons Case... What Happens to the 200 Cases Handled by the Officer?

Three months after police falsely closed a missing persons case in Jeju, a body presumed to be the missing person, Jang Mi-ran, was found. Meanwhile, a review of the legality of the arrest—requested by Police Officer A, a member of the missing persons team at the Jeju Seobu Police Station suspected of falsely closing the missing person cases of Jang and a man in his 60s—has been accepted.

With the court accepting the review of the legality of the arrest, Officer A, who was urgently arrested on the afternoon of the day before yesterday, is expected to be released soon.

Prior to this, the Jeju Provincial Police Agency had requested an arrest warrant for Officer A on charges including dereliction of duty.

Police are currently verifying how many of the nearly 200 missing person reports closed by Officer A since March of last year were falsely closed.

However, the fallout continues as it was revealed that the police failed to secure even a single piece of CCTV footage, which could have served as an initial clue in the disappearance of Jang Mi-ran.

The only footage the police had was from a CCTV camera at her home in Hallim-eup, Jeju, which her boyfriend had personally secured before the initial missing person report on May 15.

However, at the time of the first missing person report, the investigating officer, Officer A, falsely closed the case just three hours after it was filed, claiming that "contact was made with the missing person," and failed to even collect the footage secured by the boyfriend.

When the investigation was belatedly resumed following a second report by family members on July 19, surveillance footage from a total of 118 nearby security cameras had already exceeded their 30-day retention period and been completely erased.

Even immediately after the second report, the police failed to send an official letter requesting local authorities to check the remaining CCTV footage, only to engage in a "belated response" by sending an official letter to the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province a month later when the press began reporting on the issue.

Jang's bereaved family expressed outrage, saying, "Shouldn't they have sent an official letter and checked all the CCTV footage before the issue blew up?"

Experts point out that securing CCTV footage early on is core to tracking the movements of a missing person, and that the police's false closure completely blocked the opportunity to obtain crucial clues.

Ultimately, a body presumed to be Jang was found near an elementary school in Hallim-eup, Jeju, on the morning of today, about 100 days after Jang went missing.

(Reported by Lee Hyeon-yeong | Video by Kim Na-on | Graphics by Yang Hye-min | Produced by SBS Digital News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.