ed Scaling down probe?
The prosecution indicted a National Intelligence Service (NIS) agent and his civilian collaborator on Monday on charges of fabricating evidence in an alleged espionage case involving a “defector.”
The indictment came 45 days after allegations first erupted that the state spy agency forged three documents to be used as evidence by prosecutors in an appeal against a not guilty verdict for Yu Woo-sung, a North Korean defector of Chinese descent.
The prosecution said the agent, surnamed Kim, conspired with other NIS officials and paid civilian informants to produce the new evidence after Yu was found innocent. A consul general at the Korean consulate in Shenyang, China, is also suspected of issuing a false certificate confirming the authenticity of the documents without verifying it with the Chinese authorities.
The prosecution also questioned two prosecutors over allegations that they had asked the NIS agents to obtain new “evidence” supporting Yu’s guilt even through informal channels.
As things stand now, the evidence fabrication scandal alleged to be orchestrated by the NIS could end up merely with the arrest of several working-level agents and collaborators. Speculation is also swirling that the prosecution will hurry to end its investigation by indicting a couple of ranking NIS officials without detention and dropping charges against the two prosecutors on the grounds that Kim denied the involvement of his superiors, and the prosecutors allegedly were unaware of the document fabrication.
Yet it’s questionable if people will be convinced of the results of the probe. To be sure, the prosecution won’t be able to avoid criticism that it has been inactive in digging deeper into those above in the intelligence unit and pardoned the prosecutors.
True, the prosecution’s investigation has spawned complaints in law enforcement that it dented the NIS’s anti-communist investigative abilities by divulging a covert intelligence network in China, especially following the suicide attempt of another agent. But this can’t be an excuse for scaling down the probe, given the seriousness of the incident in which civil servants tried to fabricate evidence.
A reasonable suspicion is whether the NIS agents and collaborators could produce forged documents and present them as evidence to the court without the consent of their superiors in the espionage case, given the NIS’s intrinsic vertical decision-making process.
So the prosecution should not hesitate to widen its investigation, taking into account that the evidence fabrication scandal is a matter of great importance that undermined our judicial system. It’s natural to straighten things out with regards to the spy agency’s systematic involvement.
If not, there is no other alternative but to let an independent counsel begin a probe from square one.