Policeman sentenced after peeping in woman`s smartphone

"I wonder what`s in here."

In September last year, a policeman rushed to home after ending an overnight watch. At his house, he sat in front of his computer and was holding a mobile phone that didn`t belong to him. Early morning that day, he had been sent to a bar in southern Seoul after having been reported of a drunken woman collapsed in a street. He took the woman to her house, but didn`t return her phone.

The man connected the phone to his computer and sneaked a peak at the text messages the woman had exchanged with her boyfriend. The policeman also downloaded photos of her naked body and video of her having sexual relationship with her boyfriend, which her boyfriend had sent to her. One day later, the policeman told a junior policeman, saying, "Return this to her as if you had accidentally found it." The junior colleague returned the phone to the woman, who soon found out that the dates of files read were mixed. Thinking this as strange, the woman reported this to police, and the policeman had his offense detected.

Ahn Ho-bong, chief prosecutor at Seoul Central District Court, sentenced the policeman eight years in prison and two years of probation. The justice department said on Wednesday, "It is an obvious error that the policeman perused personal information from a smarthphone he obtained while on duty. Yet we took into account that the crime was committed out of simple curiosity and didn`t have other criminal intentions, and that he was relieved from his duty on this very case."