Claims have emerged that middle school girls who went missing in Daegu 22 years ago may still be alive. It has been suggested that they may have been forcibly sold into sex trafficking.
On SBS’s “I Want to Know,” which aired on the 3rd, the unsolved case of the “Daegu Middle School Girls’ Disappearance” was revisited.
Around midnight on December 7, 2001, about 22 years ago, middle school girls Min Kyung-mi and Kim Ki-min went missing after taking a taxi in Daegu.
“At the time, they were told that since they were 15 years old, they were not children, so they could only be treated as runaways instead of being reported missing,” said Min Kyung-mi’s mother. The police only said, “It seems that the two of them got off at the Northern Intercity Bus Terminal in a taxi.” However, there were no late buses at the terminal at the time스포츠토토.
Family and friends questioned the possibility that they had run away. There was no indication of a runaway in the emails Min sent to her mother shortly before she disappeared. Kim Ki-min had even made plans with a friend to go to the same daily teahouse as her graduation party.
A friend who saw Min Kyung-mi and Kim Ki-min the day before they disappeared remembered that “they said they were going to go downtown with an acquaintance of theirs who had a car.” Another friend saw the car.
Kim Ki-min’s mother claimed that “three days after the disappearance, he called me from an unknown number and said, ‘Mom, help me, help me, I’m at Busan Station,’ and then hung up.” Around March of the following year, three months after the disappearance, Min Kyung-mi’s friend messaged her, “I’m scared. Please come find me,” Min received a text message. “A man contacted me and said he was Kyung-mi’s new boyfriend,” said Min’s boyfriend at the time.
In response, Shin Park Jin-young, former head of the Daegu Women’s Rights Center, said, “It’s very similar to the atrocities we saw back then. At the time, it seems too likely that she was introduced to a sex trafficking business,” and pointed out that it is similar to the cases of sex trafficking victims.
Lee Yoon-seo, director of ‘Salim’ at the Busan Women’s Rights Center, said, “When I called 10 women (who were victims of prostitution), three or four of them said, ‘I did it when I was younger, and that’s how I first worked at a (prostitution) gathering place. My brother came with a car, we played together, he took me with him, and we got off at a place I didn’t know, and it was a (sex trafficking) gathering place,” she explained.
“If the two students were murdered, I can only assume that there is a very high probability that they would be found dead. However, such circumstances have not been found yet, so it is cautiously assumed that they are still alive somewhere.”