SEOUL, Oct 24: South Korea’s spy agency said on Wednesday that then-president Park Chung-hee had approved the infamous 1973 kidnapping in Tokyo of dissident Kim Dae-jung, who later ruled the country and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) also said North Korean agents had been responsible for the 1987 mid-air explosion of a Korean Airlines passenger jet, which killed all 155 people aboard.

The NIS was announcing the result of a three-year investigation into two of the most notorious incidents in South Korea’s turbulent history.

The probe was ordered by current President Roh Moo-hyun and carried out by a civilian-led “truth committee.” Kim, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2000 for laying the groundwork for inter-Korean reconciliation, was kidnapped by agents of the NIS’s predecessor, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, from a Tokyo hotel in August 1973.

He was taken to a ship and was about to be thrown overboard before his life was dramatically spared thanks to the intervention of US government authorities. The dissident was brought back to Seoul and put under house arrest for years.

It has long been a mystery who was behind the abduction, with fingers of blame pointed at either Lee

Hu-rak, Korean CIA head at the time, or Park himself.

“Alongside the possibility that ex-President Park might have ordered it in person, he must have given at least a tacit approval,” the NIS said in a six-volume, 3,300-page report into these and other historical incidents.

The report marked Seoul’s first official admission that a state agency was to blame for the kidnapping on Japanese soil.

South Korean ambassador Yu Myung-Hwan visited the Japanese foreign ministry in Tokyo on Wednesday to explain the findings to high-level officials.

Later, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters: “It is extremely deplorable as it was a case involving a public authority’s infringement against Japan. I want to see how the South Korean government is going to act.” The NIS report said Park began trying to curb Kim after the opposition leader almost defeated him in a 1971 presidential election.

“As Kim Dae-jung’s political standing rose dramatically in the aftermath of the presidential poll, Park started considering Kim as the most serious obstacle to his plan to extend his presidency,” the report said.

It cited testimony by former lawmaker Choi Young-keun, who quoted then Korean CIA head Lee as saying in early 1980: “I had no choice but follow the order from President Park.” Lee also told his deputy, who objected to the kidnapping order: “Hey, do you think I like to do this myself?” The truth committee called on the government to “make an official apology to Kim Dae-Jung for threatening his life and breaching his human rights.” A spokesman for Kim, now 81, said Park had given the order to murder the dissident and expressed regret that the NIS probe did not pin the blame more firmly on the former president.

Park in 1972 changed the constitution to perpetuate his rule. He was assassinated in 1979.

Regarding the 1987 bombing of the Korean Airlines plane over the Andaman Sea, the NIS confirmed the plane was blown up by a time-bomb planted by North Korean agents.

Two North Korean agents were captured afterwards in Bahrain but the man committed suicide while his female companion was taken to Seoul.

She later made a chilling confession that they blew up the plane on orders from Pyongyang to try to scare away foreigners from the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.

The NIS said its immediate predecessor, the National Security Planning Agency, had given rise to unwarranted conspiracy theories by conducting an over-hasty investigation and relying only on the testimony of the arrested agent, Kim Hyun-Hee.

The agent was jailed but later pardoned and now lives in South Korea.

—AFP