Roh ordered staff to discard 2007 inter-Korean summit transcript: source

The prosecution has verified that former President Roh Moo-hyun ordered his staff to discard a 2007 inter-Korean summit transcript from an electronic work management system used by his office Cheong Wa Dae, a source said Thursday.

A senior official at a law enforcement agency said that the prosecution discovered in the E-jiwon system minutes of Roh`s meeting with his staff on the reclassification of presidential documents. According to the minutes, when one his staff members said it was impossible to delete a document on the system, Roh ordered him to reclassify the summit transcript as a "designated record," which would be kept from viewing for 30 years, the source said.

The prosecution has also secured a statement by Cho Myoung-gyon, then presidential secretary for foreign and national security affairs, that Roh ordered him to keep the transcript only at the National Intelligence Service (NIS). Cho attended the inter-Korean summit to record the conversations between Roh and then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and created the final version of the summit transcript. Reportedly, he told the prosecution in January that Roh had ordered him to "discard" the transcript. After it was confirmed in July that the transcript did not exist at the national archives, however, he reportedly changed his statement, saying that he had ordered his subordinates to discard the document at the former president`s instruction to keep it at the intelligence agency. The prosecution has also confirmed that some 100 other documents had been scrapped.

The prosecution has also learned from a E-jiwon document that Roh pointed out some points on the transcript that he said were not exactly what he said at the summit, ordering his staff to correct them. Under the order, considerable parts of the transcript were revised, the prosecution said.

Having restored a draft of the transcript that was deleted from the E-jiwon system kept at Roh`s retirement home, the prosecution reportedly compared it with the revised version kept at the NIS. As a result, some parts suggesting Roh`s allegedly low-profile attitude toward Kim Jong Il and remarking on the Northern Limit Line were revised, according to the source.