Juyoung Choi

A Jeju police officer was arrested today for deliberately shutting down missing-person cases — not one or two, but roughly 298 of them. He told families their loved ones were safe, then quietly deleted the cases from the missing-persons system. The case cracked open because of Jang Mi-ran's disappearance, which turned out to expose a far larger cover-up. Jang Mi-ran, 37, went missing on May 12. Her boyfriend reported it, and the officer assigned to the case told him he'd reached her, that she was safe, and that she didn't want her location shared — then closed the file that same night. It later emerged there was no record police had ever actually contacted her. Once the officer was identified and implicated, investigators went back through his past cases. Between August 22 and 24, they found four bodies of people who had been reported missing — Jang Mi-ran among them, found 104 days after she disappeared, just a few minutes' walk from where she'd been staying. The other three were men, two in their 60s and one in his 70s. Since prosecutors' authority to conduct supplementary investigation was abolished, public anxiety has been mounting over how a single officer could kill hundreds of cases with almost no way for anyone to catch it. Video: the family, enraged, confronts the officer. (Chanel A News)