A Hideous Act of Terrorism
September 29, 2008 | News |
I’m late in reporting this incident which took place about three weeks ago.
Around 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday, September 9, three members of an anti-government group were brutally stabbed by a man with whom they had just had an argument over the issue of U.S. beef. One of the victims, known in the discussion site Daum Agora by his nickname “Gentleman”, was stabbed in the back of his neck and again in his forehead. He underwent a major surgery and did not regain his conscience until seven days later. The other two also suffered serious injuries.
Above: The scene of the crime, shortly after the attack.
According to the police, the attacker was drunk. Which, of course, is supposed to mean that he committed his crime only in response to some provocation (i.e. his quarrel with the victims over the safety of U.S. beef). This scenario eliminates the possibility of charging him for (attempted) premeditated murder. However, according to eyewitness accounts, the attacker was not drunk at all. In addition, he seemed to have approached his victims with a clear purpose when he picked up a quarrel with them, quickly identifying the three most important faces among the two hundred or so protesters who were at the scene. (All three victims had played significant roles in organizing the group’s recent demonstrations.)
In addition, a lot of people agree that it is very unlikely for a drunk person to successfully attack three able-bodied men with such precision — stabbing two of them in the neck, and sticking his second knife squarely in the forehead of the third. Even a sober man would have had much difficulty achieving such a feat. Could an ordinary restaurant owner — for that is what the police says he is — do that? Did his cooking skills help him do that? Where did he learn to cook, Shaolin Monastery? Now, whose account is more realistic?
Above: The scene of the crime, a few days afterwards. Several posters have been placed on the ground, protesting against the outrageous attack which many of us now believe was as an act of terrorism conceived with the goal of discouraging anti-government protesters.
Dozens of police officers were stationed in the area, because the incident took place in Jogyesa — the Buddhist temple where several leaders of left-wing NGO’s are hiding — where the three victims had been staging an all-night protest against their persecution. But none of the police officers seems to have stopped the aggressor when he entered the temple brandishing a pair of knives; and even after the attack, the stabber was put under arrest after having fled, on foot, over three hundred feet from the scene of the crime.
Eyewitnesses claim that the police tried to remove everything from the scene without investigating it. A police line was installed only when dozens of other citizens, who had been demonstrating together with the victims, strongly protested against the police’s negligent behavior. Thanks to their efforts, the scene was preserved. But it was no use; after taking the attacker into custody, the police quickly wrapped up its “investigation”. It is now officially known as nothing more than a mindless act of yet another drunk man — the same kind of tragedy that takes place every night in the city.
Above: Weapons recovered from the scene of the crime. One of the knives got stuck in its victim’s forehead, and it took surgeons several hours to remove it.
Above: X-ray photograph of one of the victims, “Gentleman”, taken immediately after he was taken to the hospital. The photograph clearly shows the blade penetrating his forehead. The image was released by the victim’s friends several days after the attack. Thankfully, “Gentleman” has regained his conscience now; however, the side-effects of his major surgery could be staggering.
Furthermore, few of the nation’s major news channels — many of which are either pro-government or else under enormous pressure from the authorities — have reported the incident in any detail. Concerned eyewitnesses posted their own accounts on the Internet (such as this one), but these posts were quickly censored. (On Daum Agora, when a post gets censored, a message is shown notifying the user that the author himself had chosen to delete the post in question. Of course, this is a lie more often than not.)
All of this, even as a second man, suspected of having planned the attack, roams free!
When the following post appeared on the website of New Right Coalition — a group of President Lee’s most devoted supporters — on June 30, few people paid attention to it. Most readers probably took it as nothing more than a hoax. It reads: “Let’s murder candlelight protesters with me, in the middle of Seoul! Any weapon would do: Japanese swords, knives, stones, lumps of metal, steel pipes, or wooden bars… Send me a note if you’d like to join me in my plans… The only way to stop protests is to murder some of them, so that they’ll be too scared to protest anymore… I’ll follow up with more details, including the date and time of the planned murder…” And the author, Kang In-Han, even includes his bank account number (which probably led a lot of readers to believe that his writing was a hoax).
Well, it doesn’t seem to have been a hoax. Internet-savvy folks soon discovered that the same person, Kang In-Han, had written repeatedly on the same topic. Whenever something bad happened to anti-government demonstrators (such as when some of them got hit by a car in late July), he praised whoever was responsible for the deed. Also, in some of his other posts, he calls himself a “Professor”. According to eyewitnesses, there was a “Professor” at the scene of the attack on September 9; this person had quietly disappeared shortly after the attack. Combined with the extraordinary knife-wielding skill demonstrated by the attacker, these circumstances have led a significant number of people to suspect that the attack was carefully planned.
Of course, these pieces of “evidence” are rather too weak to result in a conviction. The “Professor” at the scene could have been another person, perhaps a real university professor; and nobody has proof that the attack on September 9 was carefully planned — especially as the police is unwilling to repoen the case that it has so quickly decided to have been a random act of violence. Meanwhile, the government is known to have placed ordinary housewives under investigation simply for saying “I wish someone could kill the President”. The charge? “Attempted murder of the head of state”. (When the case was publicized on the Internet, the police quickly dropped the investigation and let the poor woman go home.) Now, if the government cares so much about safety and security to care about every nasty joke on the Internet, why does it not even notice Kang’s foul-smelling plans? Oh yes, the attacker confessed that he just got angry and came back with two knives. But should anyone seriously believe the words of a criminal?
Maybe it’s not a crime to attack people who disagree with the government?