Rep. Shim Jae-chul of the ruling Saenuri Party resigned from the National Assembly’s Special Committee on Ethics on Thursday, a week after he was caught on camera searching for nude photographs online during a parliamentary session.

On March 22, Shim was caught on camera while looking at a photograph of a nude woman on his smartphone.

At first Shim explained that he received the photograph through the popular mobile message application Kakao Talk and that he had opened the file to see what it was. It was later revealed, however, that he had found the picture by searching with the keyword “nude” on his smartphone. 

After days of remaining silent on the issue and staying out of the public eye, Shim resigned saying that he had no words to defend his actions regardless of the reason behind them.

“I take responsibility by resigning as a member of the Special Committee on Ethics. I will humbly accept criticism and reproach of the public,” Shim said in a statement.

Since the incident, Shim had come under increasingly heavy fire from opposition parties and the public.

Almost immediately after the incident, Shim went into hiding and even missed the Saenuri Party supreme council meeting on Monday without warning.

While Shim maintained silence, calls for him to resign from the parliamentary ethics committee as well as from the Saenuri Party’s supreme council had been mounting and spread to outside the political arena, with women’s rights groups throwing their weight behind the demands.

By Choi He-suk (cheesuk@heraldcorp.com)