President Lee Myung-bak picked veteran prosecutor-turned-lawyer Park Tae-sok as the independent counsel to look into allegations surrounding October’s hacking attack on South Korea’s election watchdog Web site, the presidential office said Friday.

Park, 55, was one of the two candidates that Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae recommended for the special investigation into the hacking attack on the Web site of the National Election Commission during the Oct. 26 regional by-elections.

In early February, the National Assembly approved the special investigation bill.

The NEC’s Web site was shut down for more than two hours on the early morning of the Seoul mayoral election. After weeks of investigation, prosecutors concluded that the attack was carried out by two low-level parliamentary aides with close ties to the ruling Grand National Party whose candidate was an underdog in the election. The GNP has since been renamed the Saenuri Party.

But opposition parties have raised suspicions that the crime must have been masterminded by higher-ranked people, claiming that it is hard to believe low-level aides carried out the plot that required a lot of money to hire hacking professionals.

Park, who is expected to be formally appointed on Monday, spent 20 years as a prosecutor before becoming a lawyer in 2006. The presidential office said that he is expected to use his rich investigation experience to lead a fair investigation into the hacking attack. (Yonhap News)