Lee Soo-keun escaped to South Korea from the North through a hail of bullets in 1967, only to be hanged as a spy two years later. Almost 50 years later, his name has been cleared.
SEOUL, South Korea — Amid the more than 30,000 defections to South Korea from North Korea, Lee Soo-keun’s stands out as one of the most sensational and tragic.
He was welcomed as a hero in South Korea in 1967 after he escaped over the border under a hail of bullets and with the help of American soldiers. Two years later, he was caught trying to leave the South on a fake passport and charged with spying for the North. Enraged South Koreans burned him in effigy, and he was swiftly convicted and hanged.
This month, nearly a half-century after his execution, Mr. Lee’s story took another dramatic turn: A court in Seoul, the South Korean capital, absolved him of espionage, ruling that he had been wrongfully executed based on fabricated charges and a confession obtained through torture.
“He was never given a chance to exercise his right to defend himself, vilified as a fake defector,” the presiding judge at the Seoul Central District Court, Kim Tae-up, said in a ruling on Thursday. “It’s time to seek forgiveness from the accused and his bereaved family for the mistake perpetrated during the authoritarian era.”
Mr. Lee’s posthumous acquittal is part of South Korean efforts to set the record straight after a military dictatorship from the 1960s to the ’80s that often used torture and fabricated spy charges to silence dissidents at home and to stoke fear of North Korea.
The efforts to expose the truth were stymied in 2008, when conservatives halted the previous liberal government’s investigations of mass killings and other rights violations perpetrated by the South in the name of fighting Communism. But families of the victims regained hope last year with the election of President Moon Jae-in, which returned a liberal government to Seoul.
Mr. Lee’s defection on March 22,1967, took place at Panmunjom, a so-called truce village straddling the border between the two Koreas. At the time, Panmunjom was a neutral zone where people from both sides mingled under the watchful gaze of military guards.
Mr. Lee, then 44 and a vice president of the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, was at Panmunjom to cover talks between North Korea and the American-led United Nations Command when he secretly asked American officials to help him defect.
