The education ministry under the former Park Geun-hye government undertook a mission to fix public opinion in favor of adopting the now-scrapped state-issued history textbooks, its internal probe team said Wednesday.

The probe team found piles of documents that show top officials from the Ministry of Education allegedly carried out a scheme in late 2015 to doctor citizens' written statements on their views of the uniform history textbooks published by the state.

The ministry said this week it plans to request that the Supreme Prosecutors' Office further investigate the case. 

The former president pushed for the adoption of the revised history books by high schools in the country by 2017. She highlighted their need, citing the "left-leaning" nature of existing versions that she said should be corrected.

The adoption of the state-issued history books was considered one of her key policies that ended up earning little public support as it faced huge backlash from opponents and historians accusing her government of manipulating modern history in a way that glorified the dictatorial rule of ex-leader Park Chung-hee, her father.

When President Moon Jae-in took office in May after Park's ouster over a corruption scandal, he scrapped the plan in the first month of his presidency.

The probe team discovered the opinion statements in chunks, which were categorized as filled out by proponents. But the personal details of the respondents, such as names, addresses and phone numbers, were all fabricated. About 1,600 of them even used the same address.

In November of 2015, the education ministry announced the tally on the opinion collection with opponents outpacing proponents around 321,000 to 152,000. (Yonhap)