Police give up hunt for men who had sex with HIV-infected teen

By Jung Min-ho

Police have given up searching for men who had unprotected sex with a girl who is HIV positive.

According to police, Tuesday, the 15-year-old girl had sex with at least 10 men. Between August and September last year, she met them through chat applications to make money.

Police said the exact number of men is hard to determine.

In May, she tested positive for HIV.

It is also uncertain when exactly she was infected with the virus and whether she continued to have sex with strangers even after she found out about her health condition.

Police confirmed she had sex with more than 10 people at motels in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, after receiving 150,000 won ($131) to 200,000 won from each person.

Police said they struggled to track down the men because the chat applications she used provided little information about them, not even their real names. Moreover, much of the data in her mobile phone and surveillance footage from cameras in and around the motels have already been deleted, so police had to rely heavily on her memory.

“She does not remember exactly when and where she met them and struggled to describe how they looked, which made the job almost impossible,” a police officer said.

All this was revealed after her parents filed a complaint with police on June 3 against a 20-year-old man, surnamed Joo, who suggested she sell sex to random people online.

The man is expected to be indicted soon on charges of procuring her for prostitution. Police said he has been in prison since March for other crimes.

The Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education said it is looking into her high school, which failed to report her illness. She dropped out of school following her AIDS/HIV diagnosis.

The number of new HIV infections is decreasing worldwide, but the opposite is happening in Korea.

According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Koreans newly infected with the virus in 2016 was 1,199, up 4.1 percent from the previous year.

Among them, 1,105 were male and 137 were foreigners. Today, 11,439 people in Korea are infected with the virus.

According to the World Health Organization, the number of new HIV infections in the world fell by 35 percent from 2000 to 2015, while it has increased here during the same period.