\n A Seoul court on Thursday posthumously exonerated a high-ranking North Korean defector executed nearly 50 years ago for spying, saying he had been convicted on trumped-up charges under the South's then military regime.\n<\/p>\n
\n Lee Soo-keun -- a former vice head of the North's state-run KCNA news agency -- made headlines in Seoul in 1967 when he made a dramatic escape through the heavily-fortified border.\n<\/p>\n
\n While covering an event at the border truce village of Panmunjom, Lee hopped onto a United Nations forces vehicle in the area to defect.\n<\/p>\n
\n Lee was hailed as a hero in the South where he soon married a South Korean woman and was hired by Seoul's spy agency, which served then-dictator Park Chung-hee.\n<\/p>\n
\n But Lee was constantly bullied at work and accused of being a double agent, prompting the disillusioned defector to try to escape again just two years later, to Cambodia via South Vietnam.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was arrested at an airport in Saigon by Seoul's spy agents and put on a trial in Seoul for spying under the guise of a defector. Lee was convicted in 1969 and executed months later, aged 45.\n<\/p>\n
\n For decades his case was widely used in anti-Communist propaganda in the South -- which technically remains at war with the North after the 1950-53 Korean War ended only with an armistice, rather than a peace treaty.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Seoul Central District Court reopened the case last year, a decade after the state Truth and Reconciliation Commission said that Lee had been forced to confess after being illegally detained and tortured.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"He was labelled by the government as a spy without being able to exercise his rights and rights to defend himself in court, and had his life taken away through execution,\" the court said.\n<\/p>\n
\n It added: \"Now is time for the nation to seek forgiveness from him and his family for the wrongdoings committed under the past authoritarian regime.\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Seoul court on Thursday posthumously exonerated a high-ranking North Korean defector executed nearly 50 years ago for spying, saying he had been convicted on trumped-up charges under the South's then military regime. Lee Soo-keun -- a former vice head of the North's state-run KCNA news agency -- made headlines in Seoul in 1967 when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-39196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n