[Anchor]

An arrest warrant has been requested for a man in his 30s, a public official, on charges of murdering his wife in her 30s who was in the middle of divorce proceedings in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province. Once again, the victim pressed her smartwatch to call the police for help, but it failed to prevent the tragedy, prompting calls for alternative solutions.

Reporter Bae Seong-jae has the story.

[Reporter]

At 7:17, a smartwatch emergency alert was received by the police from a villa in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province.

With location tracking enabled, the police arrived at the scene within three minutes, but the perpetrator had already fled.

CCTV footage showed that a police patrol car arrived just one minute after the suspect, a man in his 30s and a public official identified as A who attacked his estranged wife with a weapon while undergoing divorce proceedings, escaped the scene on a motorcycle.

The victim ultimately died, and suspect A was apprehended four and a half hours after fleeing.

This is not the first time that a smartwatch alert failed to prevent a brutal violent crime stemming from an interpersonal relationship.

In March, a woman in her 20s killed by Kim Hoon in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, and two months prior, a woman in her 60s killed by her ex-partner in Seongnam, also called for help using police-provided smartwatches, but the tragedies could not be prevented.

The police arrived at the scenes 8 minutes and 3 minutes after the reports were received, respectively, but the incidents had already taken place.

This is why critics point out that smartwatches are useless once the perpetrator has already approached and the victim is facing imminent danger.

While they may help in providing rapid emergency response or catching perpetrators, they fail to prevent crimes from happening in the first place.

[Park Mi-rang / Professor of Police Science at Hannam University : Because it is impossible to predict and arrive in advance, I think this is an inevitable limitation of the current system. We need to ponder whether there are institutional areas that need supplementation, such as police guidelines or risk assessment standards.]

The police have requested an arrest warrant for suspect A.

Considering that the couple's young children were present at the crime scene, the police explained that they determined emotional abuse had also taken place, applying child abuse charges alongside the murder charge.

(Video by Choi Jin-hwa)