Screams for blood ...

Press, 8 March 1989, Page 8

Screams for blood ...

NZPA-Reuter Seoul A confessed North Korean saboteur pleaded guilty yesterday to blowing up a South Korean airliner and killing 115 people aboard, but her trial was stopped when bereaved relatives screamed for her blood. Wailing women, dressed in mourning white, shouted curses and demanded the death penalty for a former child actress, Kim Hyon Hui, aged 27. Kim confessed on Seoul television in January, 1988, that she and a male agent planted explosives

aboard the Korean Air Lines Boeing 707 on the orders of Kim Jong 11, son and designated heir of the North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung. In the crowded courtroom yesterday, Kim, occasionally dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, pleaded guilty to the State prosecutors’ charges of murder and destruction of the airliner on November 29, 1987. The courtroom then erupted. "I’m here to kill you,” “Bring back my son” and “Bring back my husband,” the relatives yelled at her,

stopping the Judge from resuming the trial after a 90-minute lunch break. The protest lasted more than an hour before two women were ejected and order was restored. In the morning session Kim had told the Court she was recruited as a spy in 1978 while studying Japanese at the Pyongyang College of Foreign Language Studies. From 1980 she began more than seven years of training in anti-South Korean activities, learning to pass herself off as a Japanese and also studying Chinese and Russian.

Kim said she and a male colleague she first met in 1984 received written orders to blow up the plane, allegedly from Kim Jong 11. North Korea has denied involvement. The pair left the doomed airliner during a Gulf stopover, and the Seoul-bound flight disappeared a few hours later near the Burmese coast. After detention for carrying false passports by Bahrain authorities, both swallowed cyanide capsules. The man died, but Kim survived to be extradited to Seoul.