Jang Yoon-gi Frequently Said Since His First Year of High School That He Would "Kidnap High School Girls in a Van" ... Tracked Down by a Spare Phone

[Financial News] Prosecutors have reportedly secured evidence suggesting that Jang Yoon-gi, 24, the suspect in the murder of a high school girl in Gwangju, had frequently made remarks since his school days about wanting to "kidnap high school girls."
According to The Chosun Ilbo on the 21st, prosecutors view those statements and pieces of evidence as material supporting Jang's rape-murder charges.
Prosecutors conducted digital forensics on the spare mobile phone Jang was carrying when he was arrested on May 5.
As a result, social networking service (SNS) conversations he had with a former classmate around the winter vacation of 2019, when he was a first-year high school student, were recovered.
In those conversations, prosecutors found that Jang said things such as, "I want to kidnap a high school girl" and "It would be enough to kidnap her in a van."
They also questioned the former classmate and secured testimony that Jang often talked about "kidnapping high school girls."
Based on this, prosecutors requested that two former classmates and two former public service workers testify in court, saying they would prove Jang's sexual motive, planning, and distorted view of sex.
Earlier, two days before killing the high school girl, Jang received a warning text message from the police on the afternoon of May 3 after stalking a Vietnamese woman.
He was later found to have thrown away the phone he had been using into a stream and switched to an older spare phone.
That allowed him to claim an impulsive killing during the initial police investigation while concealing his rape motive.
But during the prosecutors' supplementary investigation, that spare phone instead became a clue that exposed the planned nature of the crime.
A prosecution official said, "We forensically examined the phone over a longer period than the police did," adding, "He kept making absurd claims that did not add up, so we needed objective evidence."
Investigators also found traces showing that after the crime, Jang searched for terms such as "knock out with a strike to the neck" and "blunt weapon" in places with Wi-Fi access.
During the initial investigation, Jang claimed that he did not know the victim was female and thought she was a female college student, but those claims lost credibility after these circumstances came to light.
Jang reportedly said he searched those terms because he felt sorry for using a knife.
Earlier, when he appeared at the Gwangju District Court on May 7 for a hearing on his arrest warrant, he had said that he did not do it because he knew she was a schoolgirl and that he had not planned it.
However, Jang fully admitted to the rape-murder charges at a trial on the 13th, after controversy emerged over alleged concealment of sex-crime-related details during the police investigation.
The victim's bereaved family said Jang's admission of the charges was a defensive move aimed at reducing his sentence and blocking further investigation.
[email protected] Sung Min-seo Reporter