Category: crime & punishment

The Indonesian woman accused of murdering Kim Jong-nam was released last month and it appears next month the Vietnamese woman involved in the murder will be let go as well:

A Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody for the killing of the North Korean leader’s brother pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in a Malaysian court on Monday and her lawyer said she could be freed as early as next month.
Doan Thi Huong had faced a murder charge, which carried the death penalty if she was convicted, in the slaying of Kim Jong Nam, who died after being accosted by two women in a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal. Huong nodded as a translator read the new charge to her: voluntarily causing injury with a dangerous weapon, VX nerve agent.
High Court judge Azmi Ariffin sentenced Huong to three years and four months from the day she was arrested on Feb. 15, 2017. Huong’s lawyer Hisyam Teh Poh Teik said his client is expected to be freed by the first week of May, after a one-third reduction in her sentence for good behavior.
“I am happy,” Huong, 30, told reporters as she left the courtroom, adding she thought it was a fair outcome.
While handing out a jail term short of the maximum 10 years the new charge carried, the judge told Huong she was “very, very lucky” and he wished her “all the best.” Vietnamese officials in the courtroom cheered when the decision was announced.

Associated Press

I wonder what the verdict on this would have been if it was a Malaysian murdered like this instead of the son of a foreign despot?

It looks like the Korean left’s prosecution of a members of the prior Park Geun-hye government for running a “cultural blacklist” is coming back to haunt them as they have done an arguably worse abuse of power in the Environment Ministry:

The prosecution is expanding its investigation into the environment ministry’s alleged “blacklist” to the presidential office as it is considering questioning a presidential secretary in charge of personnel affairs.

Since the main opposition Liberty Korea Party raised the allegation last December, prosecutors have confirmed some cases pertaining to a political purge. The ministry allegedly compelled 24 senior officials at its eight affiliated organizations appointed by the previous administration to step down so the posts could be filled with people loyal to the current government.

On Monday, the Seoul Eastern District Court held a hearing to decide whether to issue an arrest warrant for former Minister Kim Eun-kyung on charges of abuse of power after banning her from traveling abroad in February. Kim led the ministry from July 2017 to November 2018.

According to the prosecution, the environment ministry investigated some of the officials who were refusing to step down to uncover individual wrongdoings or business-related mistakes. Following such pressure, a standing auditor at the Korea Environment Corp. (KEC), surnamed Kim, quit in March last year.

Now, believing it is improbable that the ministry did not create the blacklist by itself, the prosecution has been looking into whether Cheong Wa Dae pulled the strings from behind the scenes.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Stories like this make me want to do a complete check of a hotel room in Korea for these spy cameras:

Two men who installed miniature spy cameras in 30 motels and live-streamed footage of around 1,600 guests were arrested, police announced Wednesday. 

Since August last year, a 50-year-old man surnamed Park and a 48-year-old man surnamed Kim installed spy cameras in 42 rooms in 30 motels located in 10 cities throughout the country.

The diameter of the camera lenses was smaller than 1 millimeter (0.04 inches), and the two men installed them in parts of TVs, power sockets and even in the hangers for hair dryers that hang on the wall in bathrooms.

Each camera had a wireless function that allowed the men to upload online videos taken on the camera to various websites.

The lives of around 1,600 guests in these motel rooms were streamed live on a pornography website that Kim ran on an overseas server.

Park and Kim made users pay for the videos on the website, and they made some 7 million won in total ($6,197) from 97 members.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but it seems like this is a small payoff considering the expense and work that went into installing the cameras.

I have been reading about this K-Pop sex scandal over the past week and can’t help but wonder why anyone is surprised this was going on?:

Police booked a serving police lieutenant as a suspect and are questioning an elite senior officer as a key witness in the mushrooming sex, drugs, celebrities and police protection scandal surrounding the Burning Sun nightclub.

Following the questioning of an elite police officer on Friday, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said Sunday that it booked a lieutenant at the Gangnam Police Precinct as a suspect for criminal negligence related to illegal activities at the club in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, which was partly owned by K-pop megastar Seungri. 

The club was located in the precinct where the lieutenant, only identified by his surname Kim, worked. This is the first time that a current police officer has been identified as a suspect in the scandal. 

Kim was accused of criminal negligence in his handling of a complaint against Burning Sun in July last year. A complaint was filed that an underage guest entered the club and drank alcohol, but Kim closed the case, saying there was not enough evidence. Kim also allegedly advised the prosecution that there was no case to pursue.

It appears that the police are speeding up their investigation, as the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office was assigned to investigate a separate but related case concerning several illicit activities discussed in KakaoTalk chat rooms by Seungri, his business partner and other celebrities. The suspected crimes include sexual assault, taking and sharing sex videos without the consent of women in them, prostitution, using drugs, bribing police and tax evasion.

“The scandal seems to be going on for a while, and it is uncomfortable that the police keep being mentioned,” a police official told the JoongAng Ilbo. “We want to quickly and sternly investigate the urgent issues.” 

One of the urgent issues concerning the police is the suspicion that an elite member of the police, who once served at the Moon Jae-in Blue House, was involved in the crimes. The senior superintendent of the National Police Agency, only identified by his surname Yun, was suspected of having maintained a close relationship with Seungri, whose real name is Lee Seung-hyun, and his business partner, Yu In-seok. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Via a reader tip comes this interesting CBS News report about an English teacher murdered in Seoul back in 1988 and how her alleged killer is free back in the US:

Imagine a loved one brutally murdered in a foreign country — allegedly by another American.
Correspondent Peter Van Sant and his team have investigated the disturbing 1988 murder of Carolyn Abel, an American teacher in South Korea, and the loophole in U.S. laws at the time that mean the suspected killer may never face trial.

For writer and author Nancy Bercaw, flying to South Korea last winter reopened a painful chapter in her life: one of murder, loss and fear.

CBS News

You can read the whole thing at the link, but the suspected killer of Carolyn Abel was her boss at the English school she worked at named Kathy Patrick. Patrick was gay and supposedly was angered when Abel rejected her advances and decided to kill her. After killing her Patrick then flew home to Washington State. Since there was no extradition treaty between the US and Korea at the time, US authorities could not arrest her for murder.

Since the murder Patrick has lived as a free woman in Washington state and she actually currently works at Western Washington University advising students.

It is speculated that this release was a political favor that Malaysia gave to Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo who goes up for re-election next month:

 An Indonesian woman held for two years on suspicion of killing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother was freed from custody Monday after Malaysian prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the murder charge against her.
Siti Aisyah cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant, Doan Thi Huong, before leaving the courtroom and being ushered away in an embassy car. She told reporters that she had only learned Monday morning that she would be freed.

“I feel very happy,” she said later at a news conference at the Indonesian Embassy. “I didn’t expect that today will be my freedom day.”
The two young women were accused of smearing VX nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam’s face in an airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur on Feb. 13, 2017. They have said they thought they were taking part in a prank for a TV show. They had been the only suspects in custody after four North Korean suspects fled the country the same morning Kim was killed.
The High Court judge discharged Aisyah without an acquittal after prosecutors applied to drop the murder charge against her. They did not give any reason.

The trial will resume Thursday, with prosecutors expected to reply to a request by Huong’s lawyers asking the government to similarly withdraw the charges against her.
Indonesia’s government said its continual high-level lobbying resulted in Aisyah’s release. The foreign ministry said in a statement that she was “deceived and did not realize at all that she was being manipulated by North Korean intelligence.”
It said Aisyah, a migrant worker, believed that she was part of a reality TV show and never had any intention of killing Kim.

MSN via a reader tip

You can read much more at the link, but I like how they call Aisyah a migrant worker when she was a prostitute in Malaysia and that is how the North Korean agent recruited her.

Anyway her co-defendant Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam I suspect will get released as well since Aisyah was let go. The four North Korean agents that organized the murder all fled back to North Korea which means likely no one will be held responsible for murdering someone with a dangerous nerve agent in the middle of a busy international airport.

An Air Force lieutenant got in struggle for “strangling” a Korean taxi driver:

A U.S. Air Force 1st lieutenant assigned to the 51st Fighter Wing at Osan Air Base was reprimanded in February for strangling a Korean national after a night of drinking, according to a recent discipline update.

The lieutenant “grabbed a Korean National taxi driver’s neck while riding in the taxi after 1 a.m., the curfew time for U.S. forces in Korea,” Capt. Rachel Salpietra, a 51FW spokeswoman, told Task & Purpose.
The driver declined to press criminal or civil charges and accepted a voluntary settlement from the service member, Salpietra said, adding that alcohol “appears to have been involved” in the incident.

Task and Purpose via a reader tip

The article was headlined that he strangled the taxi driver, but grabbing his neck with no charges filed is quite different. Nevertheless the lieutenant was given an Article 15 and the punishment shared in an email that was headlined as “strangling” a taxi driver.

This caused people on the popular Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page to complain:

A senior airman found guilty of larceny for stealing a blanket was reduced in rank to an E-3 and forced to forfeit $1,116 in pay a month for two months.

Another senior airman found guilty of stealing a blanket and jacket was reduced in rank to an E-3 and slapped with 45 days restriction. (….)

“What I’m going to take from this is if you get cold, strangle a Korean national,” wrote one Air Force amn/nco/snco reader, “but whatever you do, DON’T STEAL A EFFING BLANKET.”

The difference is that the two airman robbed a Korean store for those items. So what is worse grabbing a taxi driver by the neck while drunk past curfew or willfully robbing a store?

The other thing to remember is that the airman can likely recover career wise from their discipline, the lieutenant on the other hand has his career ended since any promotion board will see the Article 15 and reprimand.

Via a reader tip comes this news of two former USFK soldiers charged in a murder plot in Michigan:

A woman and her boyfriend were deployed with the U.S. Army in South Korea when they conspired via Snapchat to kill her husband so she could claim the life insurance money, police in Michigan said.

Berrian County Judge Sterling Schrock ruled Wednesday in a preliminary hearing that the murder trial of Kemia Hassel, 22, and Jeremy Cuellar, 24, will begin April 30.
Both have pleaded not guilty in the Dec. 31 killing of U.S. Army Sgt. Tyrone Hassel III. Cuellar was also charged with a felony firearms count.
Authorities say the 23-year-old Hassel was ambushed while visiting his family in St. Joseph Township. He died of multiple gunshot wounds, including one to the head, according to the autopsy report.
All three were soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia.
Kemia Hassel told police in a signed statement that she spent months planning how to kill her husband so she could continue her romantic relationship with Cuellar, Township Police Officer Mike Lanier testified Wednesday.
Kemia and Tyrone Hassel married in 2016 and had a 1-year-old son. She told police she was unhappy with her marriage, but didn’t want to go through a divorce because she then wouldn’t be able to receive any life insurance money, Lanier said.
Hassel and Cuellar began plotting while they were deployed in South Korea last year, Lanier said. The pair communicated through Snapchat because they believed the social media app’s temporary messages would make it difficult for police to trace, he said.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link.

Conservative journalists were thrown in jail for libel even though they reported true information, and a presidential aide is convicted of corruption and is sentenced to jail, and yet is able to walk around a free man:

A court on Thursday handed down a six-year prison term to a former senior secretary to President Moon Jae-in over a corruption case related to a gaming industry body, and one year in jail, suspended for two years, for abuse of power.
Jun Byung-hun, an ex-presidential aide for political affairs and a former lawmaker, has been suspected of forcing two home shopping channels — Lotte Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping — and telecom company KT to donate 550 million won (US$514,260) between 2014 and 2017 to the Korea e-Sports Association, over which he practically held control. But he was not taken into custody after the ruling. 
The Seoul Central Court also slapped him with a fine of 350 million won and an overdraft fee of 25 million won.
The court did not issue a warrant to arrest him as it judged that “it is appropriate for him to appeal to a higher court and solve the dispute (with the prosecution) without detention.”
“His criminal responsibility is grave,” the court said in its verdict, adding that Jun damaged the fairness and integrity of parliament by accepting bribes from companies related to his parliamentary activities.

Yonhap News

You can read more at the link.

USFK should expect that every incident involving US soldiers that the Korean media becomes aware of will be publicized:

Two female U.S. army soldiers have been questioned for allegedly assaulting a Korean man and a police officer in Dongducheon, police said Monday.

According to Gyeonggi Bukbu Provincial Police Agency, a private, 20, from the U.S. Eighth Army and a private first class, 19, from the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division were questioned in the early hours of the day after allegedly kicking and punching a man, 58, and a police officer.

This came after an altercation between the soldiers and the man at around midnight. How the trouble started is still unclear.

Police said the soldiers refused to say anything and returned to their units later.

Police plan to summon them again for questioning after checking surveillance cameras in the area.

We are not at the point that the Korean media will sensationalize these incidents yet. They will just matter of factly report every little incident to keep the GI crime narrative simmering with the public.

I suspect that after a peace treaty is signed and the Korean left mobilizes surrogates to push for US troop withdrawals that is when they will sensationalize every little incident that happens like they did in the late 90’s to early 2000’s timeframe.