Sung Il-jong, a People Power Party lawmaker who chairs the National Assembly's National Defense Committee, sharpened his criticism on Monday, saying, "The Foreign Ministry has effectively acknowledged that the HMM Nanoo was attacked," and asking, "Mr. President, you said anyone who touches a Korean will be ruined. What will you do now?"
In a Facebook post the same day, Sung said, "It is simply appalling to see our government evade the easy word 'attack' and insist on calling it an 'unidentified flying object' to the very end."
Earlier that day, the Foreign Ministry announced that a joint government investigation into the fire aboard the HMM Nanoo, which had been anchored in the Strait of Hormuz, had "confirmed that an unidentified flying object struck the stern of the HMM vessel."
Sung noted, "In fact, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries already described this incident as a 'suspected attack' on the very day it occurred. Yet from the next day onward, the presidential office called it a 'vessel fire,' and from that point on no other government ministry used the word 'attack.'"
"By contrast, U.S. President Donald Trump used the accurate expression 'a Korean ship was attacked' right after the incident," Sung said. "And yet our government has gone to great lengths to deny it was an attack. We cannot help but ask why."
Directing his question at the government, Sung demanded, "Why did the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, the competent agency, clearly call it a 'suspected attack' at first and then suddenly switch to 'vessel fire'?" He called the episode "a second witch-hunt over defection to the North" and "a second unidentified projectile." He added, "The U.S. president used the accurate term 'attacked,' so why have we described it differently? Isn't it because U.S. intelligence sharing has been restricted since Unification Minister Chung Dong-young's 'composition' remarks?"
He further asked, "Even if we weren't receiving information from the United States, what on earth were our intelligence agencies doing? The Nanoo, effectively a national asset, was attacked and the lives of our citizens were threatened, yet the government called it a 'vessel fire,' gave the public no information, took no diplomatic action and simply stood by. Why?"
"In the end, this case comes down to one of two things," Sung said. "Either the Lee Jae-myung administration was so utterly incompetent that it truly did not know the ship had been attacked, or it knew and tried to cover it up ahead of the elections." He added, "Either way, it is an extremely serious problem."
Recalling that President Lee Jae-myung had previously written in Khmer on social media — "Touch a Korean and you will be ruined" — in reference to scams targeting Koreans by Chinese-run crime rings in Cambodia, Sung asked, "Now that a serious incident threatening the property and lives of Korean citizens has occurred, what will the president do?"
He went on, "Will you continue to paper this over as though it were nothing, or will you mount a strong diplomatic response now to ensure this never happens again?" He urged, "The president must immediately deliver a forceful diplomatic message over this incident and make clear that, whoever attacked our citizens, they will not be let off."
Government acknowledges external attack, saying "two flying objects struck the Nanoo," but declines to identify the attacker: "We will not prejudge."
