A revision of the Location Privacy Protection Act will go into effect on Nov. 15 after its promulgation this week, allowing the police to track the location of callers to their 112 hotline, the National Police Agency said Sunday.
Under the revised bill that passed parliament and the Cabinet earlier this month, police are allowed to seek help from mobile phone operators to track the physical location of an emergency caller without his or her permission.
The bill is expected to prevent a recurrence of a tragic incident in Suwon, in which a woman was brutally raped and murdered despite calling police for help.
Until Nov. 15, police will track the location of emergency callers through cooperation with the 119 Fire Service, NPA officials said.
Following the April 2 incident in Suwon, 40 kilometers south of Seoul, the NPA commissioner resigned to take responsibility for the police's inadequate response to the woman's 112 emergency call.
The mutilated body of the 28-year-old victim, whose name was withheld, was found at the house of the murder suspect in Suwon, south of Seoul, late in the morning of April 2, about 13 hours after she called police for help. A recording of the phone call revealed she gave a detailed description of her location, saying she had been and was being raped.
Police arrested a 42-year-old Korean-Chinese man, surnamed Woo, as a suspect in the case.
Police initially claimed the phone call lasted only 15 seconds and the victim did not give an exact location. However, it was later revealed that the caller remained on line for seven minutes and 36 seconds and gave a relatively clear explanation of her whereabouts.
(Yonhap News)
