South Korea to seek woman’s extradition

Press, 8 December 1987, Page 10

South Korea to seek woman’s extradition

NZPA-Reuter Seoul South Korea is sending a special envoy to Bahrain to negotiate the extradition of a mystery woman suspected of involvement in the destruction of a South Korean airliner, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday. The Assistant Foreign Minister, Park Soo Gil, was due to leave Seoul later yesterday for "diplomatic negotiations” with Bahrain, the spokesman said. The woman and her elderly male companion,

both East Asians carrying falsified Japanese passports, got off the Korean Air Lines plane in Abu Dhabi on November 29 only hours before it disappeared near Burma. Intensive searches for the plane near the ThaiBurmese border have so far failed, and all 115 people on board are presumed dead. The pair swallowed cyanide capsules when they were stopped at Bahrain airport. The man died but the woman survived the suicide bid. South Korea’s State

broadcasting system reported that the woman had uttered one English phrase. A private television station said the phrase was “What shall I talk.” Foreign Ministry officials declined to confirm the reports. Security officials in Bahrain have said the woman was moved on Friday from a tightlyguarded hospital to an island prison a few miles off the west coast. In Tokyo, a newspaper reported on Monday that an East German connection had emerged in the

case. The mass-circulation "Yomiuri Shimbun” quoted police sources as saying the couple had East German coins and photographs in their possession. The newspaper also quoted police sources as saying that investigators in Bahrain had found trick cigarettes with hollow filters of the same kind used by a North Korean spy arrested in Japan before fleeing for East Germany in 1973. The Japanese police declined to comment on the report.