Men Concluded to Have Fallen to Death After Robbery-Murder
No Accomplices or Additional Victims Found
The incident in April at a hotel in Paju-si, Gyeonggi Province, where four men and women died, was concluded to be a case in which two men committed robbery and murder due to debt and then took their own lives.
On the 10th, the Gyeonggi Northern Provincial Police Agency announced that after analyzing the mobile phones and bank transaction records of the two deceased men among the four victims, one man had debts amounting to hundreds of millions of won, and the other had debts of several tens of millions of won. Earlier, the police found that the men had deliberately lured two women to the hotel, subdued them in the room, and then contacted the women’s acquaintances pretending to be the women themselves to demand money.
A police official told Yonhap News Agency, "Through the investigation so far, there has been circumstantial evidence that the men committed the crime for financial motives," adding, "The debts of the men can be seen as supporting evidence for this." It was also confirmed that no accomplices other than the two deceased men were found, and there were no additional victims.
Although the perpetrators’ course of action was revealed, since all of them died, the case was closed with a 'no prosecution' disposition. 'No prosecution' is a disposition given when a trial cannot be requested due to the death of the accused. The police arranged through the Ministry of Justice for the victims’ families to receive support for funeral expenses and emergency living costs.
On April 10, in a hotel in Yadang-dong, Paju-si, Gyeonggi Province, two men in their 20s died from a fall, and two women were found dead in the room where they had stayed, prompting a police investigation. The two men were friends, and among the two women, one was acquainted with the men, but the other was found to have contacted the men through a job-seeking chat room.
Through forensic analysis of the men’s mobile phones, the police confirmed that on the day of the incident, April 8, the two deceased men searched the internet for terms like 'baekchoke' and 'knockout' before luring the women to the hotel room, and prepared cable ties and tape. Additionally, messages exchanged between them around the time the women were presumed to have been subdued in the room included phrases like "Should we kill them?" and "Yes." The deceased women were found bound by their hands and necks.
After receiving a missing person report from the family of one of the deceased women, the police tracked taxi routes and analyzed closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage to confirm that the woman had gone to the hotel, and on the morning of April 10 around 10 a.m., they visited the hotel room. A man who came out of the room stated that the woman had gone out the previous night to a busy district in Goyang-si for some errands. While the police went downstairs to the first floor to check the CCTV for fact-finding, the two men jumped from the room balcony and died.
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