Convictions Deal Blow to South Korean Intelligence Service
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Version 0 of 1. SEOUL, South Korea — In the latest blow to the image of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, a court on Tuesday convicted two of its counterintelligence officials of fabricating Chinese government documents to build a spy case against a refugee from North Korea. A 48-year-old agent, who was identified only by his family name, Kim, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. A 54-year-old former head of the spy agency’s counterintelligence investigations was sentenced to one and a half years. They were accused of faking a set of immigration documents, ostensibly issued by the Chinese government, to build a spy case against Yu Woo-sung, an ethnic Chinese from North Korea who defected to South Korea in 2004. The agents “seriously obstructed the function of the criminal justice of the country,” Kim Woo-soo, a judge at the Seoul Central District Court, said in his verdict on Tuesday. “They betrayed the trust the people placed in the National Intelligence Service when it gave it both power and responsibility.” When he arrived in South Korea, Mr. Yu told officials here that he was a North Korean so that he could qualify for the South Korean citizenship and resettlement aid granted to defecting North Koreans. In truth, Mr. Yu, now 33, was a fourth-generation ethnic Chinese in the North and had carried a Chinese passport with the Chinese name of Liu Jiagang. Yu Woo-sung was the Korean name he adopted in the South. The National Intelligence Service caught up with him early last year, when it accused him of spying for North Korea. It built its case largely on confessions it said Mr. Yu’s sister from North Korea, Liu Jiali, had made after she entered South Korea in 2012, also pretending to be a North Korean refugee. The intelligence agency said Mr. Yu had made secret trips to North Korea after his arrival in the South and had been recruited as a spy by the North’s Department of State Security. The tables turned against the agency when Mr. Yu’s sister later told a news conference organized by human rights lawyers in Seoul that she had been coerced to make false accusations against her brother while being held for 179 days in the Joint Interrogation Center south of Seoul, in near isolation and without legal representation. In August last year, a court in Seoul threw out a spy charge against Mr. Yu, rejecting his sister’s confessions as evidence because it said she was never apprised of her right to remain silent. It also called her statements inconsistent and implausible. It gave Mr. Yu a suspended sentence for lying about his nationality. The spy agency appealed and presented the appeals court with what it called official Chinese records on Mr. Yu’s border crossings into North Korea. In February, however, the Chinese Embassy in Seoul told the court that the Chinese records the spy agency had submitted were “faked.” Opposition parties and civic groups have accused the agency of reviving old practices from the era of military rule, using coercion and fabricated evidence to concoct spy cases to the benefit of those in power. President Park Geun-hye apologized over the scandal in April and later replaced her intelligence chief. The intelligence service has been dogged by a series of scandals. Last month, Won Sei-hoon, its former director, was convicted of meddling in domestic politics when he ran a team of agents who posted numerous online comments criticizing Ms. Park’s domestic rivals, including opposition candidates, ahead of her election in late 2012. Mr. Yu’s case also brought attention to the agency’s Joint Interrogation Center. In 2010, South Korea changed its laws to allow the center to keep and question fresh arrivals from the North for as long as six months, twice the previous limit. The measure was taken amid fear that North Korea was planting spies among migrants bound for the South. “The problem with the Joint Interrogation Center is that there is no independent monitoring and control,” Mr. Yu’s lawyer, Kim Yong-min, said in a recent interview. “For refugees who have no relatives in the South, there is no way of knowing whether they are held there. It’s a facility where there is a high probability of human rights abuse and people can easily be framed as spies.” Little has been known about what happens inside the center, which is surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire. Some former inmates have recently told human rights researchers and opposition lawmakers that they were subjected to abusive language, violence and threats of deportation. In a rare news release in 2011, the agency said a North Korean had committed suicide after confessing to being on a spy mission. After Ms. Park’s apology, the spy agency changed the center’s name to the Center for Protection of North Korean Refugees and vowed to keep its practices there transparent by permitting visits by lawyers and outside monitors. |