On 26 March 1991, a public holiday for local elections, five schoolboys aged 9 to 13 went up Mount Waryong, a 300-metre hill on the edge of Daegu, to look for salamander eggs. Early reports garbled that into “frogs”, and Koreans still call them the “Frog Boys”.

They never came home. What followed was the largest search in Korean history: hundreds of thousands of police and soldiers, their faces printed on cigarette packs and phone cards, a reward that grew to 42 million won.

In September 2002, a man gathering acorns found their remains on the same hill. A university forensic team ruled it homicide. No one was ever charged, and the statute of limitations expired in 2006.

Some details most English coverage misses:

• Police first treated it as a runaway case.
• In 1996, one of the fathers was publicly accused and his house was dug up. He was cleared.
• A child reported hearing a scream from the mountain that day. It was never properly followed up.

I wrote a longer, sourced write-up with a timeline (link above). Curious what people here think: how could five children stay hidden on a small, heavily searched hill for 11 years?