[Editorial] Prosecution Ignoring Truth in 'Suicide Note Case'

The police "truth commission" reinvestigating "Gang Gi Hun suicide note ghostwriting case" have tentatively concluded that the writing on the note is not Gang's. It has also announced that the prosecution wrongly presupposed that he was a suspect in aiding the suicide and then investigated in a way that made the pieces fit accordingly.

In 1991, Gang, an official in an opposition organization, was indicted for writing a suicide note for Gim Gi Seol and aiding and abetting his suicide by self-immolation. Once indicted, the government at the time used the story for a massive publicity offensive designed to make the opposition look bad. The note was the prosecution's conclusive evidence, but to this day it is suspected that the handwriting appraisal of the note may have been manipulated by investigators. The police's truth commission has found new circumstantial evidence that the National Institute of Scientific Investigation, which looked at the handwriting, was subjected to outside pressure from prosecution investigators, but it has not clearly determined whether the case against Gang was entirely a fabrication. It has only arrived at an incomplete conclusion - that were circumstances that make you suspect the investigation was tailored to fit a script.

The biggest obstacle to figuring out what happened is the prosecution's uncooperative attitude. The truth commission found new samples of Gang's handwriting and tried to compare it to the note, but the prosecution would not respond. Faced with pressure to open the record of the prosecution's investigation, it tried to avoid genuine disclosure by allowing a few members of the National Assembly to look at it, on site, for two hours. It does not have the same determination to resolve unsolved questions from the recent past that you see at the Ministry of National Defense, the National Intelligence Service, and the National Police Agency. The prosecution has consistently circumvented the issue by saying that should be the work of the police and the NIS, which were involved in the preliminary investigation, and the courts that judged the case. How will the public ever understand when the prosecution fails to do its own inquiry and does not cooperate with an outside inquiry? You wonder whether prosecutors are in any position to say so sarcastically that the police are now going so far as to do the work of the courts.

Justice minister Chun Jeong Bae has promised to actively cooperate with a separate truth commission that was set in motion at the start of this month. You cannot keep that kind of promise if you are afraid of being shamed. There needs to be a court retrial, but aside from there one would still like to see the prosecution have a profoundly changed attitude about finding the truth.

The Hankyoreh, 17 December 2005.

[Translations by Seoul Selection]