By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
A senior prosecutor who led the investigation into the MBC TV program ``PD Notebook'' over distortions of English-Korean translations involving mad cow disease, offered to resign Thursday.
The Seoul Prosecutors Office confirmed Lim Soo-bin, 48, tendered his resignation Wednesday.
The program played a key role in encouraging people to hold massive candlelit rallies against the resumption of U.S. beef imports from May through September, pulling down President Lee Myung-bak's approval rating to 10 percent at the height of the protest.
Sources said the resignation came amid mounting discord between Lim and his boss as to whether the mistranslation can be subject to punishment. They said Lim had stuck to his opinion that the program's intentional mistranslation and exaggeration of some contents were done at a tolerable level, defying the chief prosecutors' request of taking a hard-line approach.
Lim has opposed the prosecution's move to seek warrants to arrest the program directors, who have refused to accept summons for questioning. Amid the escalating conflict, he decided to quit, insiders said.
But the prosecution officially denied any conflict between Lim and other chief prosecutors.
``His resignation is closely related with the ongoing investigation. So I cannot confirm whether there have been any conflicts between Lim and his colleagues,'' said a senior prosecutor who declined to be named.
An episode of PD Notebook, aired on April 29, 2008, reported the risk of mad cow disease in the United States. In the episode, Aretha Vinson, a deceased Virginian woman, was described as having died from vCJD, the human form of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), or mad cow disease, although neither the speaker being interviewed, nor the U.S. Centers for Disease Control supported that claim. The program also claimed that BSE was the cause of ``downer'' cattle, and that Koreans were more susceptible to BSE than other ethnic groups.