Suspect detained in child abduction-rape case

Police said Friday they have detained a 25-year-old man on suspicions of kidnapping and brutally raping a 7-year-old girl in the latest sex crime to shock the nation and cause President Lee Myung-bak to offer a public apology.

The suspect, identified only by his surname Ko, allegedly abducted the elementary school first-grader early Thursday morning while she was sleeping at her home in Naju, 356 kilometers south of Seoul, before raping and abandoning her on a remote riverside.

The girl was found naked with what appeared to be rape-related injuries around 1 p.m. on a nearby riverside road.

The girl, who was rushed to a local hospital for treatment for damage to her genitals and intestines, told police she had been carried away wrapped in blankets by an unknown man and was taken under a bridge over the Yeongsan River.

The grisly case was reported by local media just hours after Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik and 30 senior officials of the government and the ruling Saenuri Party met and agreed to expand the use of chemical castration for sex offenders as part of efforts to root out repeated assaults against women and children.

The meeting came in the wake of recent sexual assaults victimizing women and children and violent crimes targeting citizens at random, which have stoked widespread concerns on public safety. Last week, a convicted sex criminal attempted to rape a woman in eastern Seoul before stabbing her to death, although the suspect was wearing an electronic tracking device at the time.

The Naju case is particularly shocking to the nation, as the government had pledged sweeping countermeasures against child sex offenders after a notorious child rape case that occurred in Ansan, south of Seoul, in 2009.

In September 2009, a 57-year-old man named Cho Doo-soon from Ansan was sentenced by a district court to a mere 12 years in prison for brutally beating and raping a girl, known only as Na-young, after kidnapping her on her way to school in December of the previous year. Na-young sustained irreversible damage to her genitals as a result of the rape.

Police said the disappearance of the girl was reported by her mother to police around 7:30 a.m. Thursday.

"I came home around 2:30 a.m. and realized that my daughter was not in her room at around 3 a.m. I just assumed she was sleeping with her dad in another bedroom," the mother was quoted by police as saying.

The suspect is believed to have entered through the front door, which appeared to have been unlocked, police investigators said.(Yonhap)