Plane-crash suspects take poison; one dead

Press, 3 December 1987, Page 10

Plane-crash suspects take poison; one dead

NZPA-Reuter Tokyo A man who killed himself in Bahrain after leaving the South Korean airliner which disappeared near Burma may have been involved in a North Korean spyring case in Japan in 1985, press reports said yesterday. The man and his female companion, both carrying Japanese passports, swallowed poison capsules while being questioned by Bahrain officials on Tuesday. The woman is in a Bahrain hospital under heavy guard. In Seoul, officials said they believed the pair were Korean residents of

Japan and suspected they could have links with North Korea. A South Korean diplomat in Bahrain said he suspected that they were linked to the fanatical Japanese Red Army guerrilla group. The two left the illfated Korean Airlines (KAL) Boeing 707 when it stopped in the Gulf city of Abu Dhabi on Sunday en route from Bagdad to Seoul.

The plane, with 115 people on board, disappeared near the Thai-Burma border and Thai and Korean airline officials say it may have exploded in mid-air. The mass-circulation “Yomiuri Shimbun” and

Kyodo News Service said Tokyo police believed the dead man, using a passport with the name Shinichi Hachiya, was connected with a North Korean spy network uncovered in Japan in 1985. Police investigated and searched the house of a man named Miyamoto who was alleged to have helped spy-ring members to obtain forged passports, the news reports said.

Police officials delined to comment on the reports.

A spokesman for the main pro-North Korean organisation in Japan told Reuters it had no connection with the missing plane.

“The (South Korean authorities) are again plotting viciously against North Korea and our organisation by suggesting a connection,” he said. A Japanese man with the same name as that on the passport used by the dead man in Bahrain told reporters in Tokyo that he had lent his passport to a man named Miyamoto in 1983.

He said the man he knew as Miyamoto was a Korean resident of Japan. In 1983, a North Korean agent committed suicide after being arrested in Burma following the Rangoon bombing which killed 17 senior South Korean officials.