Police fail to find origin of rumors linked to actress' suicide

SEOUL, Oct. 7 (Yonhap) -- Police said Tuesday they have failed to track down the origin of slanderous rumors that are believed to have pushed actress Choi Jin-sil to her death, closing the investigation with minor charges against four people.

Several suspects have been summoned since the death of Choi last week, who
reportedly suffered as a result of rumors circulating on the Web that blamed her
for the suicide of another actor in early September.
Police booked four employees of securities firms for further investigation on
allegations of spreading the rumors. But their efforts to track down the initial
source yielded little results, they said.
"From the beginning, we thought it won't be easy to trace the first person," an
officer at the Seocho Police Station criminal affairs division told reporters,
preferring he not be named.
Securities companies are thought to be the most common origin of celebrity gossip
in Korea. Distributed to investors and conglomerates' informants, their tip
sheets provide prying stories on the private lives of entertainers and
politicians as well as secret information on rival firms.
Police believe such tip sheets make their way into the Web through online
messengers and popular portal sites. Web postings said Choi had loaned another
actor, Ahn Jae-hwan, a substantial sum of money and that Ahn killed himself under
pressure to pay the debt.
Investigators acknowledged Ahn seemed to have been under pressure from loan
sharks but called the rumor of Choi's involvement "groundless."
The four suspects, whose names were withheld because the probe is still under
way, said they heard the rumors through Internet messengers but could not
remember who had sent them. Tracking the Internet messengers they used yielded
little success because their servers did not preserve instant messages, police
said.
Before taking her own life, Choi had sought a police probe into the rumors. One
of the suspects was arrested in late September, and she had called Choi to ask
for leniency. The phone call provoked the actress further as she had been hurt by
the gossip, police said.
Police said they will soon decide whether to charge the suspects with defamation.
The 40-year-old Choi, noted as "The People's Star," was found hanging from a
shower stall in her house in southern Seoul on Thursday. Her death was a painful
shock to a nation that had watched her climb the career ladder over the past two
decades to become a household name.
Malicious online slander and depression after an ugly divorce in 2004 were cited
as the main factors that drove her to suicide.