Suspects in Crash Take Suicide Pills

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"Suspects in Crash Take Suicide Pills"

KAL Flight 858 bombed by North Korea

Newspaper article

Date: December 2, 1987

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INTRODUCTION

On November 29, 1987, the ground station tracking Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 858 lost radar contact with the commercial airliner. At the time of its disappearance, the airplane was over the Andaman Sea near Thailand and Burma (now known as Myanmar) while on its scheduled daily route from the Abu Dhabi International Airport in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to the Don Muang Airport in Bangkok, Thailand. (It normally would have ended its regular Abu Dhabi-Bangkok-Seoul route at the Kimpo Airport in Seoul, South Korea). As information quickly came in about the disappearance, evidence mounted that the airplane had been destroyed by a terrorist bomb. It was eventually determined that the mid-air bombing completely destroyed the aircraft, killing everyone on board: four crew members and 104 passengers.

Two North Korean citizens were soon arrested in the country of Bahrain, located in western Asia, and became prime suspects in the terrorist bombing. At the time of bombing, KAL 858 was the deadliest terrorist attack against South Korea.

The two suspects, one male and one female, were traveling as tourists with forged Japanese passports that identified themselves as Shinichi Hachiya and Mayumi Hachiya, father and daughter, respectively. It was learned that the two suspects, who had boarded the airplane in Baghdad, Iraq, had left a radio and a glass bottle containing explosives in the airplane's overhead luggage compartment before exiting the aircraft in Abu Dhabi.

Upon being arrested, the male suspect (Shinichi Hachiya) committed suicide by swallowing poison. The woman (Mayumi Hachiya) also swallowed the same poison, but a lesser amount, and she survived.

The woman, whose real name was Kim Hyun-Hee, was turned over to South Korean officials who returned her to Seoul. She later confessed to the bombing on live Korean television. In 1990, Hyun-Hee was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the bombing crime. The court later granted her a pardon, ruling that Hyun-Hee was not the primary perpetrator in the bombing but an innocent victim of North Korean brainwashing. Hyun-Hee admitted during her interrogation that she had been tutored in Japanese language, mannerisms, and society by a Japanese national known as Lee Un Hae, who, unknown to Hyan-Hee, had been kidnapped by North Korea. Hyan-Hee was allowed to remain in South Korea.

PRIMARY SOURCE

SUSPECTS IN CRASH TAKE SUICIDE PILLS

Police Try to Question Couple Off Missing Korean Plane Manama, Bahrain, Dec. 1— A man and woman who had been passengers aboard a South Korean jetliner before it left the Middle East and disappeared over Burma took suicide pills today as they waited for the police to question them, the authorities said.

The man died, but the woman was expected to live.

The plane, with 115 people aboard, vanished near the Burma-Thailand border, before a scheduled refueling stop in Bangkok. Officials in Seoul have said there are strong suspicions that a bomb destroyed the aircraft.

BOARDED AT BAGHDAD

Officials said the couple, whose identity was unclear, boarded Korean Air's Flight 858 at Baghdad, where it originated Sunday, and got off at Abu Dhabi before the Boeing 707 headed across Asia toward Seoul. From Abu Dhabi, they flew here.

The two, who were believed to be either Japanese or Korean, had been traveling on forged Japanese passports, apparently as father and daughter, Japanese officials here said.

The man, who appeared to be middle-aged, died four hours after biting into a suicide pill concealed in a cigarette, said Takao Natsume, Japan's acting Ambassador in Bahrain. He said the woman, who was younger, was unconscious in critical condition at a military hospital but added, "She will survive."

They had been waiting to be questioned by immigration officials who had stopped them from boarding a Rome-bound flight after Japanese officials told them the woman's passport was forged.

"Just after swallowing the pills they both fell on the floor and their bodies went very stiff," Mr. Natsume said.

The woman, he said, had apparently survived because she swallowed less of the poison, which was hidden in the cigarette filters. The type of poison was not known.

South Korea's Government broadcasting service said investigators were checking to see if there was a link between the woman and Chosen Soren, an organization of Koreans living in Japan that supports the Communist Government in North Korea.

Security officials in Bahrain said investigators also were checking on possible ties between the couple and the Japanese Red Army, which has been linked to several Middle East terrorist groups and to North Korea, but Mr. Natsume said he had no evidence of such a connection.

Thai police units searching for wreckage left by the plane reported today that there was a large swath of leveled trees in mountains along the border. An official of the airline said, "There is a high possibility that the missing plane crashed because of a bomb explosion" because no distress call was received from the aircraft.

Foreign Ministry officials in Seoul said the man and woman were "known to have arrived in Iraq from Yugoslavia," but did not indicate when.

In the passports they carried, the dead man was identified as Shinichi Hachiya, 69, and the woman as Mayumi Hachiya, 27, both from Okayama, Japan.

Mr. Natsume said the man's passport was believed to be authentic until Japanese authorities found the real Shinichi Hachiya in Tokyo.

SIGNIFICANCE

Kim Hyun-Hee was born in North Korea to a father who was a senior government diplomat. Beginning late in her teenage years, at approximately 19, Hyun-Hee was trained in covert-operations for the North Korean government. Her career ended about seven years later when she was arrested for the 1987 bombing of KAL 858. At the time of the South Korean investigation, Hyun-Hee admitted that the bombing was ordered by Kin Jong Il, the son of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. (Because South Korea was hosting the Olympic Games and North Korea had not been asked to do so, some experts argued that Kin Jong Il decided to plan a terrorist attack to scare tourists away from visiting the Summer Games.)

Hyun-Hee's testimony reinforced the evidence against North Korea as a country that supported terrorism and harbored terrorists.

In part due to the investigation of the bombing of KAL 858, it was learned that North Korea had been kidnapping innocent South Korean and Japanese citizens and using them as low-level agents for various espionage ventures. For example, in one kidnapping case relevant to Hyun-Hee, the National Police Agency in Japan identified in 1991 a young Japanese woman who had earlier disappeared. Using the name Yaeko Taguchi, the woman was identified as Lee Un Hae—the woman who had earlier tutored Hyun-Hee. Hae had been kidnapped earlier by operatives of North Korea.

South Korean's intelligence agency, by the late 1990s, had pieced together many of the stories and clues it had found about Japanese and South Korean citizens being kidnapped by people working for the North Korean government. At that point, under mounting pressure and evidence, North Korea's President Kin Jong Il, who had succeeded his father Kim Il Sung in 1994, confessed to his country's kidnappings of Japanese and South Korean citizens.

In the book The Tears of my Soul, author Hyun-Hee described the techniques used to train her as a spy for North Korea and, ultimately, the details of the KAL 858 bombing. Her account of North Korean brainwashing techniques described how people were forcibly coerced and controlled to perform violent acts of terrorism for North Korean leaders.

Although no specific person or organization was formally accused with the original authorization and resultant planning of KAL 858, many terrorist experts argue that the existing evidence indicates that the government of North Korea was behind the terrorist activity.

After the KAL 858 incident, the United States officially listed North Korea in 1988 as a terrorist state.

During the presidential State of the Union address in January 2002, President George W. Bush stated that North Korea was one of the countries included within regimes that sponsored terrorism—which was commonly called the Axis of Evil—along with the countries of Iraq and Iran.