By Yun Suh-young
The police are under fire again after a suspect escaped from a cell at Dongbu Police Station in Daegu at around 5 a.m. Monday. The 50-year-old man is still on the run.
Police officers said they did not know of the escape until two and a half hours after his flight.
The man, identified only by his surname Choi, was caught last Wednesday on suspicion of robbing a house and injuring the owner in July.
The suspect was last reported to have been seen at a convenience store in Cheongdo, North Gyeongsang Province, Tuesday. The police immediately conducted random questioning but failed to locate him.
He broke into a house and stole a wallet and car key at around 4 p.m. Monday after escaping police custody.
Choi already has a criminal record after serving three years in prison for raping a middle school girl in 2008. He was released earlier this year.
He managed to squeeze under the door of his cell via the gap left for food and then got out through the window of a door leading out to the street.
The gap was 45 centimeters wide and 15 cm high. The window was 2 meters above ground level in a door leading to the outside and was 170 cm wide and 68 cm high with three steel bars installed horizontally, 13.5 cm apart. This is barely large enough to push through a take-out coffee cup.
Choi was 165 cm tall and weighed just 52 kilograms.
Despite his physique that may have made it easier for him to fit through the narrow space between bars, there are suspicions surrounding his escape.
The first is how a person could pass through the steel bars even if he is as thin and small as Choi. Regarding the suspicions, the police said a surveillance camera caught the man hanging on the window bars although it did not catch the moment he escaped through.
Cable TV channel JTBC conducted an experiment to see if it was possible for a human to pass through the gap. Comedian Lee Yang-seung, known for his small size at 159 cm tall and weighing 48kg, tried to pass through a same-sized hole made of wood but failed. Lee, however, said it might be possible to move past steel bars because they are more slippery than wood.
If Choi really did escape in this manner, the question arises on why the police are not revealing the surveillance camera footage to the public.
The police are refusing to make the clip public, further fanning suspicion that they weren’t doing their job and are trying to cover up their mistake, caught on camera.