South Korea Faces Domestic Skeptics Over Evidence Against North
By Ben Richardson and Saeromi Shin
May 30, 2010
May 30 (Bloomberg) -- South Korea’s government is trying to stem skepticism about an inquiry that blamed North Korea for the sinking of a warship, according to local media reports.
Prime Minister Chung Un Chan ordered the government to find a way to stop groundless rumors spreading on the Cheonan’s sinking, the JoongAng Daily said yesterday. Prosecutors questioned a former member of the panel that probed the incident over his critical comments, the paper said. The Joint Chiefs of Staff sued a lawmaker for defamation after she said video footage of the ship splitting apart existed, a claim the military denies, Yonhap News reported.
Almost one in four South Koreans say they don’t trust the findings of the multinational panel, according to a poll commissioned by Hankook Ilbo on May 24. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency yesterday accused the South’s “puppet military of trying to cover up the truth about the sinking” by seeking to silence opposition lawmakers with the lawsuit.
Lee Jung Hee, a lawmaker with an opposition party, the Democratic Labor Party, was sued for defamation by seven people at South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yonhap News reported May 25.
Lee said during a speech in parliament that while the Defense Ministry had said there was no feed from a thermal observation device showing the moment the warship’s stern and bow split apart, such a video did exist
Prosecutors May 28 questioned Shin Sang-cheol, who runs Seoprise, a Web-based political magazine, over his assertion that the Cheonan sank in an accident and that the evidence linking the North to the torpedo was tampered with, the JoonAng said. Shin served on the panel that probed the sinking.
The magnified photograph of writing on the torpedo showed that the marking was written on top of a rusted surface, the newspaper cited Shin as saying. The Defense Ministry asked the National Assembly to eject Shin from the investigation for “arousing public mistrust,” the report said.
North Korea warned the UN to be wary of evidence that it said falsely accuses the country of torpedoing the warship, likening the case to the claims of weapons of mass destruction that the U.S. used to justify its war against Iraq in 2003.
Twenty-four percent of respondents said they didn’t trust the government’s evidence, with more skepticism among younger and better-educated people, the Hankook Ilbo poll found. Almost 90 percent of people over 60 trusted the findings, while only 70 percent of those in their 40s did.
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