bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Niall Fraser

When police forced their way into the Hong Kong flat of bar hostess Suzy Kim Ock-pun on January 20, 1987, and found her decaying corpse stuffed under a bed, they were unravelling a tale of international espionage and deceit.

Kim - or Suzy as she was to become known - had been strangled with a belt, and when detectives found her, had a pillow case slipped over her head.

Two weeks earlier her husband, Yoon Tae-shik, 43, had reported her missing to the Hong Kong police before he left the territory for Singapore.

Events that followed caused a sensation in South Korea and eventually led the Hong Kong detectives investigating the killing to doubt the credibility of Yoon's claims of a North Korean kidnap plot.

On January 7, 1987 - almost two weeks before Kim's body was discovered - a tearful Yoon appeared on South Korean TV in a news conference apparently arranged by Seoul's spy organisation, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).

Yoon's story was that a few days earlier two men had turned up at the couple's flat in Knutsford Terrace, Tsim Sha Tsui, to see his 34-year-old wife. They had told him to make himself scarce and when he returned, she was gone.

As he sat in the Kowloon flat, worrying about Kim's whereabouts, he received a telephone call. The anonymous caller instructed him to go to an address in Singapore if he wanted to see his wife again, he said.

Yoon caught a plane to the Lion City and took a taxi to the address he was given, which turned out to be the North Korean Embassy. Suddenly it all became clear, Yoon told the news conference, his wife had defected and was trying to lure him to the communist North.

That was when the KCIA stepped in, picked up Yoon and took him back to Seoul.

At this time, news reports began appearing in Hong Kong and South Korea saying that Kim was a spy for Pyongyang who had either fled to the North or had been killed by North Korean agents for failing to lure or kidnap her husband.

But after finding Kim's body, Hong Kong police had their doubts. They were convinced Yoon was their man. Investigators from the British Special Branch and former Organised and Serious Crime Group, which was to become today's Organised Crime and Triad Bureau, took over the probe.

'We certainly felt he was the prime suspect and that it was unlikely anyone else could have murdered his wife,' said one officer who worked on the case.

Their investigations were hampered because Hong Kong does not have an extradition treaty with Seoul. It also became mired in the murky Cold War espionage between North and South Korea.

It has since emerged that the KCIA quickly became aware that Yoon's tale of kidnap and defection plots was bogus, but saw it as excellent propaganda material against the North and ran with the story.

The spy agency has since admitted to a cover-up and several of its top officials have been sacked.

Before his sentencing last week, following his confession last year to the murder, Yoon had become a successful venture capitalist in Seoul who secured deals from Saudi Arabia to Silicon Valley. Investigators also allege he paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials in the intelligence community and elsewhere to exert influence on behalf of his business interests.

Yoon was jailed for 15 years on Thursday, bringing to an end his fantastic bid to escape punishment for a sordid murder - he killed his wife in a simple argument over money.

Organised Crime and Triad Bureau detective Stephen Tarrant, who has taken a close interest in the case, was still piecing together the evidence until Yoon's conviction last Thursday.

'I worked on the original investigation and I was still working on it this week, when he got 15 years,' Mr Tarrant told the Sunday Morning Post with barely disguised satisfaction last week.

Department of Justice officials in Hong Kong have also hailed the conviction under the new Mutual Legal Assistance agreement signed with Seoul, adding that negotiations are under way for a formal extradition treaty with South Korea.

Yoon will almost certainly never be brought to justice for killing in Hong Kong - the legal protection of double jeopardy will see to that.

For Kim, the young woman from Chungju, 70km southeast of Seoul, who came to Hong Kong to support her family after her father died, a noble endeavour ended in tragedy.

Kim was buried in a Sandy Ridge Cemetery on March 10, 1987. Her remains were exhumed six years later and the ashes scattered over a communal site in the same cemetery.

NEWS13GET



Bizarre spy tale that hid a sordid murder