vA mother on Monday confessed to beating her first daughter to death over four years ago, a day after she was arrested for neglecting her duty to provide educational care for her children, police said.

The 42-year-old woman, surnamed Park, in Goseong, South Gyeongsang Province admitted that she had tied up her then 7-year-old child with tape in a terrace and beat her to death for damaging home furniture in October 2011. She left her child tied overnight on the terrace and she was found dead later the next day.

Police added charges for beating the daughter to death.

Park previously argued that she had lost her first child at a playground in 2009. She was arrested for not having her second daughter registered for school. This is the first case in which a Korean parent has been arrested for neglecting to provide education for children.

According to Goseong police, she buried the daughter’s body in a mountain in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, with the help of three acquaintances who lived together in an apartment. They lived together from January 2009 along with their respective children after Park ran away from home over domestic troubles. 

The police arrested two of the accomplices and booked them for helping to discard the body. The third was booked without detention.

The investigators found Park in the midst of a nationwide search for the whereabouts and statuses of students who have been reported absent from school for a long time, or those who had never been admitted to school. The move was launched as part of the government’s efforts to curb child abuse amid a series of high-profile crime cases involving children.

The police probed Park as they found that Park’s second daughter, now 9 years old, was never admitted to school, while the first child was missing but never reported.

The mother had insisted that she was hiding from debt collectors. 

Investigators are currently searching for the child’s body.

By Lee Hyun-jeong (rene@heraldcorp.com)