Slight doubt over bomb

Press, 5 March 1988, Page 20

Slight doubt over bomb

From the “Economist,” London

North Korean agents almost certainly put the bomb on the South Korean airliner that crashed in November, killing all 115 people aboard. Almost? Without the "smoking gun" there is always the shadow of a doubt.

South Korea produced the nearest thing to a smoking gun in the shape of Miss Kim Hyon Hui who travelled on the doomed aircraft as far as Abu Dhabi. Miss Kim said in a taped confession shown on South Korean television that she and an accomplice, who committed suicide, placed a time bomb in the aircraft on North Korean orders. The aim was to discourage foreigners from taking part in the Seoul Olympics. The North denied planting the bomb. Predictably. It is also showing intense indignation at

being accused of the Since Miss Kim’s televised confession North Korea has issued a stream of documents purporting to show she is not from the North. She has a Seoul accent, it claims. She speaks of shopping. tibi,(TV) sokjoe (atonement) and other words said -to be unfamiliar in the North.

A “Liberation from Japan” medal she said she was awarded is not known in the North. Photographs issued by South Korea of Miss Kim as a schoolgirl in Pyongyang are dismissed as fakes. There is more, but it is for the untiring specialist. Dr Watson. The North took little such umbrage after , thei Rangoon bombing in 1983,’when 17 senior South Koreans were killed. North Korea formally denied any in-

Ivement. and left it at that.

[The reason for the present hot denials may be: that the North is innocent (unlikely); that the North is split and speaks with two voices (possible); or that it is trying to. cast doubt on a confessibn obtained by the South’s secret police (quite likely). I The South, having got; its own versioa,.of the disaster accepted by most of the countries that matter, including the United States and Japan, is now anxious to resume its normal unrelations with the North. The ties of blood, even spilt blood, remain curiously strong.; ! The new -President, Mr Roh Tae Woo, said this week that the South had “no intention to close doors” on [its "brother.” Oh. brother.

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