[ad_1]
SEOUL: South Korea’s presidential office said on Saturday (Sept. 26) that it will ask North Korea to further investigate the fatal shooting of a South Korean official, as public and political outrage over the assassination mounted.
After a meeting of the National Security Council last night, South Korea said it would request a joint investigation into the case with North Korea if necessary, and said there were discrepancies in the two sides’ accounts of the accident.
South Korea’s military said on Thursday that North Korean soldiers killed the man, doused his body with fuel and set him on fire near the maritime border.
But the North Korean government said in a message on Friday that its soldiers shot the “illegal intruder” and denied burning his body.
READ: Seoul says North Korea ‘sorry’ for killing South Korean official at sea
In a rare move on Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was quoted as offering an apology for disappointing his counterpart Moon Jae-in and the South Korean people.
The main opposition People’s Power Party said on Saturday that Kim’s apology was not genuine and that the case should be sent to the International Criminal Court and the US Security Council.
The Moon government faces intense political pressure on how it responded to the incident, which coincided with a renewed push from the president to engage with Pyongyang.
Critics accused Moon of failing to save a citizen’s life and being soft on North Korea, saying the military made no attempt to save him despite seeing him six hours before he was shot dead.
The government official was reported missing while on duty on a fishing boat near Yeonpyeongdo Island, near the South Korean maritime border.
South Korean officials said the man had run into debt and likely tried to defect to the North. But his brother refuted that, saying he had just bought a new boat and that he must have had some kind of accident.
“Not everyone in debt wants to go North,” said the brother, Lee Rae-jin, on social media.
“What was the army doing when it was floating around our waters for almost a day?”
