By Kang Hyun-kyung
Staff Reporter
The Grand National Party (GNP) urged President Roh Moo-hyun, Sunday, to make a public apology for supporting political surveillance and to dismiss the head of the intelligence agency for the production and leakage of classified documents on its presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak.
Rep. Ahn Sang-soo said the National Intelligence Service's (NIS) running of a special team in an attempt to smear leading presidential candidate Lee was a crime. He said it was the Korean version of ``Watergate,'' which led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon for illegally eavesdropping on the Democratic Party.
The GNP leaders will visit the NIS, the Prime Minister's Office and the Prosecutor's Office this week to convey their views on the seriousness of their charges.
Ahn urged the prosecution to take legal action against all those involved, adding that the GNP will schedule a meeting with lawmakers to condemn the widespread, intrusive use of political surveillance.
The NIS recently admitted it had run a special team to investigate property dealings of Lee for two years, and the team accessed classified information through a government online system.
Ahn is head of an in-house committee, which was designed to tackle the ruling camp's possible smear campaigns against the contenders.
As head of the committee, he requested last Thursday, that the prosecution look into whether or not the agency was also behind the circulation of classified documents on the late religious leader Choi Tae-min.
Choi is known to have been a mentor of presidential contender Park Geun-hye and involved in various corruption cases when he was alive.
``Citizens should not be the victims of illegal surveillance orchestrated by government agencies,'' said the prosecutor-turned-lawmaker.
Party spokeswoman Na Kyung-won criticized the intelligence agency for monitoring the private life of the GNP presidential candidate and leaking classified documents.
``By doing so, the agency helped a third player (apparently the Park camp) attack the former Seoul mayor,'' she said.
Na added, ``It needs to be clarified if the agency performed the wrongdoings of its own free will or whether someone else was behind the plot.''
She said it was the brother-in-law of Rep. Moo Hee-sang of the pro-government Uri Party who spearheaded the surveillance. ``We cannot rule out the possibility that the governing camp has something to do with the surveillance,'' she said.
The NIS said the inspection was part of its routine and denied that it was a politically motivated plot.
A spokesman for Park, the archrival of the former Seoul mayor in the GNP presidential race, also criticized the NIS for documenting Lee's property deals. But he urged Lee to give a direct explanation over his questionable accumulation of wealth through allegedly suspicious property deals.