By Na Jeong-ju
An 87-year-old relative of President Lee Myung-bak has been reported missing, police said Monday.
The family of Lee Geun-i, a granddaughter of a brother of the president’s great-grandfather, reported to police on Oct. 16 that she disappeared near a mountain in Cheongsong, North Gyeongsang Province, according to the Cheongsong Police Station.
She is known to have suffered from dementia for a long time.
Lee had been gathering wild mushrooms on the mountain for a number of days together with her eldest son, two granddaughters and a grandson-in-law. Her family said it was an annual family tradition to visit the mountain and pick wild mushrooms in autumn.
“We suspect that she might have been lost. However, there are possibilities that she might have been kidnapped or been involved in a car accident,” said a police officer from Cheongsong station.
Surveillance cameras installed at nearby villages showed Lee walking alone with a cane one day before she was reported missing. Residents who saw her told police she was walking alone. Some asked her where she was going, but she didn’t answer.
Cameras showed her in a village at 1:10 p.m., before she appeared at 2:22 p.m. at another village a few kilometers away.
More than 1,000 police officers and rescue workers, and sniffer dogs have been mobilized to search for her, the station said.
According to her family, she once disappeared five days earlier at the mountain, but was then found soon after.
Police didn’t rule out the possibility that she might have been deserted by her family.
She was left alone on the mountain on the day she went missing. While leaving her alone, other family members went down to a village to get water.
Her son told police this happened because “she wasn’t afraid of being alone and showed confidence in picking mushrooms alone.” He said his mother was not there when they returned to the place hours later, and reported her as missing to police the next day.
“It’s quite strange that all other family members went down the mountain, while leaving the dementia patient alone,” the officer said.