The arrest of S Korean officials is related to the 2020 North Korean murders

• Suh Wook, a former defense minister, and Kim Hong-hee, the head of the coast guard, have been given arrest warrants.
• They are suspected in a cover-up surrounding the murder of a fisheries official by North Korea in 2020.
• The Board of Audit and Inspection demanded last week that prosecutors look into a total of 20 people.

The former defense minister and head of the coast guard of South Korea have been given arrest warrants for their suspected roles in a cover-up surrounding the murder of a South Korean fisheries officer by North Korea in 2020.

Suh Wook, a former defense minister, and Kim Hong-hee, a former commissioner general of the Coast Guard, both received arrest warrants on Saturday. The Seoul Central District Court did this due to the possibility of the suspects running away or destroying evidence.

The Board of Audit and Inspection, a South Korean investigative body, demanded last week that prosecutors look into a total of 20 people, including Suh and Kim, for allegedly concealing crucial information regarding the 2020 murder of 47-year-old fisheries official Lee Dae-jun by North Korean border soldiers.

After learning that Lee was drifting in waters close to the North Korean border, officials made no significant effort to save him, according to the agency’s examination into how a previous administration handled the killing.

According to the inquiry, Lee was discovered and shot by North Koreans, who then left him in the water for almost six hours while he drifted in and out of consciousness.

By failing to contact local authorities and other vessels during their first rescue operations, the South Korean coast guard and navy were also judged to have broken guidelines.

Officials in the previous administration of President Moon Jae-in publicly played up the notion that the victim had sought to defect to North Korea after it was revealed that Lee had been shot and killed by North Korean troops.

The agency claimed that officials exaggerated the dead man’s gambling debts and other family problems while hiding proof that he had no intention of defecting to North Korea.

The murder happened just as Moon was coming under heavy political pressure over a fresh effort to engage Pyongyang on the political front.

Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, also expressed regret for the South Korean’s death. Kim expressed his “very sorry” for “disappointing” South Korea’s then-President Moon in a formal letter that North Korea forwarded to Seoul.

The investigative report states that Suh, acting on orders from Moon’s national security office, ordered a representative to destroy roughly 60 military intelligence reports connected to the incident as the government postponed announcing Lee’s passing and deliberated how to explain it to the public.

The agency added that the coast guard, led by Kim, had falsified simulations of Lee’s drifting to support the assertion that he had attempted to defect.

As they appeared in court for reviews of the prosecution’s warrant requests on Friday, Suh and Kim did not respond to queries from media regarding the accusations.

The opposition liberal Democratic Party, which maintains that President Yoon Suk-yeol is conducting the investigations as part of a political vendetta against his predecessor Moon Jae-in, did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the arrests.

The 2019 forced repatriation of two North Korean fishermen is also being looked at by Yoon’s administration, despite their alleged desire to reside in South Korea.

Critics claim that Moon’s administration never gave a clear justification for returning the two escapees to North Korea, where they risked being put to death.

In a joint statement, many foreign groups, including Human Rights Watch, charged Moon’s administration with failing to uphold the law and “protect anyone who would be at significant danger of torture or other serious human rights violations after repatriation.”

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