Police on Sunday requested an arrest warrant against a married couple in their 30s on charges of abusing and mutilating the dead body of his seven-year-old son, who allegedly died in 2012.

The court issued a warrant for the mother, who failed to report the death of her son on grounds of child abuse.  The arrest warrant against the father, who admitted to mutilating the body of the son but denied killing the child, was still being reviewed.

The body of the boy, who had been absent from school for nearly four years since 2012, was found by the police Friday at the home of an acquaintance of the father. The authorities had launched an investigation Wednesday, two days before the discovery of the body, after the boy’s school staff filed a request in hopes of getting in touch with the long-absent student.

The police confirmed that the father admitted to mutilating the body of the son. The authorities also announced that an autopsy would be performed to determine the exact cause of the boy’s death. “We are conscious of the possibility that the boy may have been killed by his own parents,” said Lee Yong-hee from the National Police Agency.

According to the police, the 34-year-old father told the authorities that in October 2012, his son tripped and fell unconscious after he physically and forcibly dragged the child into a bathroom. The child had been reportedly refusing to take a bath at the time. 

The boy eventually woke up, but the father didn’t take him to the hospital. The father said he “neglected” the son after the injury and the child eventually died the following month at his home in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province. The father never reported the son’s death. Instead, he placed the body parts in the freezer, and took them with him when he and his family moved to Incheon from Bucheon in 2013.

He moved the frozen body to his acquaintance’s house in Incheon on Friday, as he was afraid of being caught, the same day the police eventually discovered the boy’s body and arrested him.

The reasons behind the negligence and mutilation of the body are still unknown.

Police confirmed that the father currently does not have any mental illness, nor does he have any history of it. 

The boy enrolled in an elementary school in Bucheon as a first-grader in March 2012. He stopped showing up to classes the next month.

According to police, the school sent two letters, one on May 9 and the other on May 18 in 2012, to the boy’s home, but received no response. On June 11, the vice principal of the school and the boy’s homeroom teacher together visited the home in person, but reportedly no one was at the property at the time.

The police also found that the boy’s younger sister, who is currently in the third grade, had been showing up at school regularly. Her teachers reportedly didn’t notice any signs of abuse within the last two years, the police said.

The children’s mother told police she didn’t report her husband to the authorities as she was “worried about raising her daughter alone.”

Just last month, following another high profile child abuse case in Incheon where a father confined his 11-year-old daughter at home and continually abused her for more than two years, the South Korean government announced that it was launching a special investigation nationwide on all schoolchildren absent from school for more than a week.

South Korea has seen a dramatic increase in its number of reported child abuse cases, from 7,406 in 2010 to 15,025 in 2014, partly due to stricter rules on reports. In 2014, more than 80 percent of the abusers were confirmed to be parents of the young victims.

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)