p style=”padding-left: 40px”>Moon and his government sat on the news of the killing for two days until a pre-recorded speech in which the president proposed a peace treaty with North Korea had safely been beamed out to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly.
Both the president and the military have been accused of cowardice and dereliction of duty. In their defense they have since perpetuated the claim that the official had chosen this route to defect.
Today we hear that the man's family are demanding a UN investigation:
Government apologists have claimed that the man wanted to defect to North Korea, but the official's family denies this.
His elder brother Lee Rae-jin on Tuesday visited the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul and requested an independent probe of the killing.
The request is poignant since Moon hushed up the killing for two days until after he had delivered a speech calling for peace with North Korea to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly.
At a press conference, Lee raised the possibility of joining hands with the parents of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was imprisoned in North Korea in 2016 on a charge of subversion and died after he was released in a coma in 2017. He vowed to "tell the world about the brutality of North Korea." […]
The official, who worked as a fisheries inspector, went missing from a patrol boat on Sept. 21 and was spotted by a North Korean Navy ship the following morning. Accounts differ what happened next. The South Korean military says the man's captors kept him in the water for six hours while they interrogated him, before "an order from above" came to kill him. They then fired a dozen rounds into him before setting him ablaze.
But North Korean leader Kim Jon-un, in a letter of apology to Moon, claimed the official was killed immediately and only his life vest was set on fire while the body had disappeared.
The military, which looked on while the official was being first kept in the freezing water and then murdered, later claimed that the man must have wanted to defect because he left his shoes behind on board and wore a life vest. But life vests are mandatory on patrol boats, and no evidence of the shoe story has been presented so far.
Neighbors and family of the official say it would have been madness to choose that route to defect to North Korea even if he had wanted to.
Murkier and murkier.
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