By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
"Dicom14" was his ID, and "slim'' was his nickname. Internet users searching the Web have found out the undisclosed life of Jung Seong-hyeon, the self-confessed killer who kidnapped and murdered two elementary schoolgirls.
Jung, 38, operated two personal blogs on major Korean portal sites, Empas and Naver. He was also the manager of two small, dormant online forums at Daum and Sayclub.
Many Internet users have accessed those Web pages and left comments filled with anger and cursed the man who is believed to have killed at least three people, including the schoolgirls and a woman in her 40s.
The Internet posts by Jung, along with pictures of him and his relatives, have provided more information about the killer than that which newspapers and TV news have shown.
As usual with suspects of big criminal cases, police covered Jung's face with half mask whenever he was exposed to the media as they tried to protect his privacy. No Korean-language newspaper has printed his photograph or even his full name, as is customary for criminal suspects in South Korea. Meanwhile, virtually every newspaper had photos of sobbing parents of the dead girls on their pages.
Empas, the portal site that has one of Jung's two blogs closed access to it on Monday. The Empas blog has nine posts, including the lyrics of a Korean pop song called ``A Sad Fool,'' and pictures of his sister and nephew.
``There is no rule that we should not protect the privacy of criminals. Furthermore, the privacy of his relatives should be protected as they had nothing to do with this case,'' said Kim Hun, a public relations official of SK Communications, the company that manages Empas.
He said that many insulting comments had been attached to the post of Jung and his family from anonymous Internet users, which is illegal here. The government's regulations on the management of Web sites allow portal operators to deny access to personal blogs or other Web pages when there is the possibility of libel or invasion of privacy.
On the contrary, Naver, another Web portal on which Jeong had run his blog, kept the blog open to the public. Jeong left only one posting on the Naver blog, a six-line essay named ``my diary.'' The first sentence of the 2005 July posting is: ``Love was always a selection.''
Some 50 people left comments on the blog. Most were furious to see that a man who had killed two girls wrote an essay about love, and condemned him to death.
``The posting didn't carry much information about the man so we decided to leave it open. We only filter comments that have insulting expressions,'' said Naver's public relations official Nam Ji-woong.
Police arrested Jeong on March 16 and have charged him with the murders of Lee Hye-jin, 10, and Wu Ye-seul, 8, both of whom went missing on Christmas day in southern Gyeonggi Province.
They say he confessed that he sexually abused the two schoolgirls before suffocating them at his residence in Anyang and disposed of the dismembered bodies, police said. He also confessed to killing a 44-year-old woman in 2004.
Another Web site carrying Jung's personal information is iloveschool, an online network of school alumni. The site shows that he was born on July 14, 1969, and graduated from elementary, middle and high schools in Seoul and a two-year college in Ansan.
He also tried to operate online forums at Daum, a Web portal, and Sayclub, a social-networking site. But the forums didn't gather enough popularity.
At the board, he said he was looking for drinking buddies in the Anyang region.
``We are short of people now, but let's have a meeting when we have more than 10 members,'' Jung said at the Sayclub community on Jan. 16, 2006.
The club had only three members other than him.
indizio@koreatimes.co.kr