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Police have arrested a man who attempted to kidnap a 10-year-old schoolgirl in Ilsan, north of Seoul on March 26. The arrest came only four-and-a-half hours after President Lee Myung-bak visited the Ilsan police station and reproached police for incompetence in arresting child kidnappers and protecting children from danger. Chief investigator Park Hak-geun said the attempted kidnapper, identified as Lee, was arrested at a public sauna in Daechi-dong, southern Seoul on Monday afternoon.
Lee served 10 years in prison for raping underage girls and was released two years ago. He told investigators he had attempted to kidnap the girl to rape her. According to Gyeonggi Provincial Police, an officer from the Daehwa branch office watched surveillance camera footage in which the 41-year-old man tried to pull the girl out of an elevator at an apartment, threatening her with an unidentified weapon. But the branch office reported the incident as an ordinary incident of assault to Ilsan police station, which on March 27 instructed an assault squad to investigate. However, the team sat on it for two days and only went to the apartment and checked on the video footage on March 29, three days after the attempted abduction.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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