It looks like it is a strong possibility that Kim Jong-nam was meeting with a US intelligence agent a few days before he was assassinated by North Korean agents:
Kim Jong-nam
A police witness said Monday that the estranged half-brother of North Korea’s leader met with an unidentified Korean-American man on a Malaysian resort island four days before he was murdered, as the trial of two women accused of killing him resumed.
Indonesia’s Siti Aisyah, 25, and Vietnam’s Doan Thi Huong, 29, are accused of smearing VX nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam’s face in a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur last Feb. 13. They pleaded not guilty to murder charges when their trial began Oct. 2. The two are the only suspects in custody, though prosecutors have said four North Koreans who fled the country were also involved.
Chief police investigating officer Wan Azirul Nizam Che Wan Aziz told the court Monday that Kim flew from Macau to Kuala Lumpur last Feb. 6 and went to the northern island of Langkawi two days later. He said Kim met with the Korean-American at a Langkawi hotel the next day, but he didn’t know the man’s identity and it wasn’t related to the $138,000 in cash found in Kim’s backpack when he was murdered.
Wah Azirul was responding to questions from Gooi Soon Seng, Aisyah’s lawyer, who asked him to confirm a report by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun that Kim had met in Langkawi with a US intelligence agent who was based in Bangkok.
“Until now, the identity of the man is not known,” Wan Azirul told the court. He said he could not remember the hotel name or whether the room was registered under Kim or the man, prompting a lashing from Gooi for his “severe lapse of memory.” [NY Post]
You can read more at the link, but meeting with a US intelligence agent may have been the final straw for his younger brother Kim Jong-nam to finally decide to assassinate him.
I can only imagine what the Family Readiness Group (FRG) meetings would have looked like if this soldier’s gangster husband showed up to them:
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kevin Chang denied bail Wednesday for the accused pimp who federal prosecutors describe as violent and intimidating.
Isaiah McCoy is charged with sex trafficking by force.
Wearing a white, inmate jumpsuit and a belly chain, McCoy did not speak in court, allowing his assistant federal public defender Max Mizono to argue that McCoy is not a danger to the community or a flight risk.
McCoy’s wife, Army Sgt. Tawana Roberts, also remains at the federal detention center. Her bond hearing is scheduled for Jan. 24.
The couple was arrested on Jan. 3 by police in an undercover prostitution sting at a Waikiki hotel.
One of the pieces of evidence being used against the couple, a Facebook Live video posted two months ago, in which Roberts and McCoy are in a hot tub.
McCoy jokingly asks as he grabs his wife, “How much is this going to cost me?”
Roberts responds: “You already know the going rate for me … five stacks.” That’s slang for $5,000.
But, according to HPD documents obtained by Hawaii News Now, Roberts agreed to take $500 from an undercover officer in exchange for sex acts.
McCoy has been in Hawaii less than a year after he was released from Delaware’s death row.
He married Roberts a few months ago. She is a food service specialist at Schofield Barracks.
McCoy is not allowed on post because of prior convictions for burglary, robbery and drug crimes. [Hawaii News Now]
You can read more at the link, but this McCoy character is quite the walking crime spree. His wife is not much better considering she was arrested working as a prostitute over in Waikiki.
This explains a lot of why this North Korean soldier was in such a rush to defect across the DMZ:
A North Korean soldier who made a desperate dash across the border in November escaped after causing a person’s death, a South Korean newspaper reported Tuesday, quoting an unidentified intelligence official.
According to the report in newspaper Dong-A, the confession came from Oh Chung Sung—or Oh Chong Song, depending on the translation—over the course of a routine interrogation led by the the South Korean spy agency.
“I committed a crime in North Korea, which caused a death,” Oh reportedly said. Though South Korean media reported his comments about killing someone, the nature of the alleged crime was not clear.
The South Korean Ministry of Unification did not confirm the reports. “The investigation has not been completed yet,” a ministry spokesperson told reporters at a press conference, quoted in South Korean news agency Yonhap. “We cannot confirm specific details of the incident.” [Newsweek]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is not expected that the ROK will send the defector back to North Korea despite the murder.
Yet another example of a stupid criminal getting caught after committing a horrific crime:
Kim Sung-kwan is being taken from Yongin Police Station, Gyeonggi Province, Monday, to inspect the crime scene. / Yonhap
Kim Sung-kwan, a Korean who flew to Auckland three months ago after allegedly killing three family members here, said Sunday that he had plotted everything to take his mother’s money.
According to police, he has been arrested on charges of killing his mother, 55, stepfather, 57, and half-brother, 14, with a sharp object on Oct. 21 and stealing 118 million won ($110,000) from the mother’s two bank accounts.
Police have found that Kim owed 60 million won and had no stable job.
Police have also confirmed that for two days before executing the plot, Kim searched information about weapons, how to use them and how a criminal extradition system worked between Korea and New Zealand.
According to police, he first killed his mother and half-brother at her apartment in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, between 2 p.m. and 5p.m. He then killed his stepfather at a parking lot in PyeongChang, Gangwon Province, at around 8 p.m. the same day.
Two days later, he flew to New Zealand with his wife, surnamed Jung, and two daughters ― one aged two years and the other seven months at that time.
But Kim, who has a permanent residency in New Zealand not know he was wanted there for a crime he committed two years ago ― stealing household appliances.
By the time a local court found him guilty of the theft, Korean police learned where he was and asked the New Zealand government to send him back. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but obviously his Internet research on extraditions from New Zealand were not very well executed. Hopefully this brutal murderer rots in prison for the rest of his life.
This is a horrible crime committed by a South Korean man in Hong Kong:
Hong Kong police have arrested a South Korean man on suspicion of murdering his wife and seven-year-old son at the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel, according to Reuters.
The two were found dead in a room at 8:30 a.m. The man reportedly appeared drunk and injured. He was arrested at the scene and sent to hospital.
Further details were not available immediately. [Korea Times]
This is just another example of why these military sexual assault cases are not as black and white as the advocates want people to believe:
What started as a consensual relationship of rough sex and role playing between two Army attorneys could be headed to court-martial.
Members of the defense and prosecution teams made their closing statements Friday, on the third and final day of a preliminary hearing for Capt. Scott Hockenberry, an Army attorney and former special victims prosecutor accused of sexual assault and battery against a former girlfriend.
Hockenberry faces three counts of sexual assault and three counts of assault consummated by battery, based on accusations that he choked, slapped and held a knife to the accuser’s throat, in addition to forcing her to have sex without a condom during the summer of 2016.
The case’s fate hangs on whether Hockenberry was mistaken about the nature of the incidents, in the context of a relationship in which both accuser and accused agree that acts like slapping and hair-pulling were fair game.
The prosecution presented the accuser, who declined to testify at the hearing, as an educated, professional woman who — despite her knowledge of self-defense techniques — froze up when she felt threatened by a man she was intimate with.
“She doesn’t hide the fact that she’s done things she’s not proud of,” special victim prosecutor Lt. Col. Carol Brewer said. “She doesn’t deny that she should have known better.”
The defense pushed back with multiple letters and testimonies from Hockenberry’s friends and former lovers, who described him as a top-notch officer, as well as kind and considerate of the women he had been intimate with. [Army Times]
Here is what Hockenberry did in one instance of rough sex:
Where Hockenberry crossed the line, Brewer said, was in holding a knife to the alleged victim’s neck and forcing her to have sex without a condom, despite condom usage being an explicit rule of their relationship.
This is what Hockenberry claims his accuser is really upset about:
Helixon pushed back, alleging that the alleged victim is out for revenge.
“It’s at that time that she discovered the breadth and depth of the other individuals” he was having a sexual relationship with, Helixon said.
You can read the rest at the link, but this article read more like the Duffel Blog than the Army Times.
This is just another example that South Korea does not have freedom of speech because of its libel laws:
Civic activists take part in a press conference at the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on Mar. 21. (by Kim Bong-kyu, staff photographer)
“T,” a Liberian-born resident of Gyeonggi Province married to a South Korean, had an unpleasant experience while riding a bus in Nov. 2016. The passenger in the seat next to her, a man in his sixties surnamed Kim, began harassing T. When passengers tried to stop him, Kim pointed at T and said, “It’s illegal for this girl to be here.” T was not an undocumented foreigner, but a South Korean resident with an F6 (marriage) visa. In Kim’s eyes, however, all foreigners were seen as undocumented migrant workers. T brought her experience up during the Q&A session at a symposium held that Nov. 30 by the Gyeonggi Institute of Research and Development for Migrants’ Human Rights on the topic of racial discrimination and policy measures for its reduction.
One of the symposium’s discussants, attorney Choi Jeong-gyu of the law firm Wongok, took an interest in T’s story. Choi decided to represent T in a defamation complaint against Kim. It wasn’t easy: Kim kept denying all charges during the police questioning stages, and while the police recognized the incident as a case of harassment in a crowded public setting according to the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment, etc., of Sexual Crimes, they forwarded the case to prosecutors with a recommendation not to press defamation charges. However, in April, the prosecutors delivered Kim for trial on charges of both harassment and defamation.
Judge Hon. Kim Do-hyeong of the eighth criminal division of Suwon District Court’s Ansan branch found Kim guilty on both charges last May and sentenced him to a fine of 2 million won (US$1,840). “In November 2016, the defendant boarded a bus and engaged in harassment while talking to the victim, who was sitting next to him,” the court concluded. “When stopped by other passengers, he declared that it was ‘illegal for this girl to be here,’ and he continued insulting the victim with abusive language even after disembarking.” [Hankyoreh]
You can read more at the link, but this guy was clearly a jerk for harassing this woman minding her own business on the bus.
Prosecutors said Wednesday they will indict ousted President Park Geun-hye on additional bribery charges as early as this week over allegations that during her term Park took bribes from the state spy agency.
An official from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said that prosecutors are also considering “gradually pressing charges against the others involved.”
Prosecutors have been investigating allegations that the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s main spy agency, provided Park with up to 200 million won (US$188,000) in kickbacks every month between May 2013 and July 2016.
Prosecutors suspect that the NIS paid Park around 3.8 billion won in total and that she used those funds personally or to carry out illicit political activities. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but if President Park was receiving that much money every month as a bribe from the National Intelligence Service (NIS) then she needs to receive jail time. With that said I would love to see what this evidence is because the evidence of all her other supposed crimes has not been very forthcoming during this whole legal process she is going through.
It seems to me having your daughter go missing under your care is worse than having an accidental death due to choking:
Police on Friday found the body of a 5-year-old missing girl on a hillside in the western coastal city of Gunsan following her father’s confession to having disposed of it, officials said.
The Jeonbuk Provincial Police Agency said that at 4:45 a.m., the body of Koh Jun-hee was discovered wrapped in a towel under a tree on the hillside, about a 50-minute drive from where she stayed. She was reported to have gone missing a little over three weeks ago.
The investigation into the case gained traction as her 36-year-old father, who was put under emergency arrest, confessed Thursday to having dumped her body on a hill in the city 270 kilometers south of Seoul in April.
Based on the father’s statement, police presume that Koh died because she choked on food. Her father has said that he concealed her death for fear that it would cause trouble in his divorce settlement with her birth mother.
Police plan to examine her body to find out the exact cause of death, officials said. [Korea Times]
It looks like there is an English teacher job opening at Sahmyook University after one of their professors was fired due to his link to the murder of four people back in Canada:
Paul Laan
A former professor at a Seoul-based university is a suspect in a mysterious missing-person case in Canada, according to South Korean broadcaster JTBC.
Canadian Paul Laan taught English at Sahmyook University in Nowon, northern Seoul, from 2014. The university stripped him of his professorship early this month after learning of the accusations in Canada and then terminated his contract.
According to the report, Laan came to Korea in 2006 and earned a living by teaching English at private or public institutes.
According to JTBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), he was a suspect in a high-profile missing-person case in Ontario in 1998. A woman in her 70s, known as the “Cat Lady,” was a tenant in his house and disappeared outside Huntsville. Police later found that three other tenants were missing.
Police investigating the case saw Laan as a suspect but they found no evidence, and it became a cold case.
CBC put the case back in the spotlight on its investigative program “The Fifth Estate,” aired in September.
The program said the residents’ disappearance was not reported and that pension checks were stolen from them by the Paul family. The youngest of the family was living in South Korea as a professor, according to the program.
“Paul now teaches English at a university in South Korea and travels with his wife extensively, professing their love for God on their family blog,” CBC reported. [Korea Times]
You can read the whole CBC report on these murders at this link. The Paul family are all part of a crime family in the Huntsville area of Canada that have a long criminal history culminating in the murder of four people.
