A former top intelligence official killed himself just days after being questioned about his involvement in a South Korean wiretapping scandal, police said yesterday
Lee Soo-il, 63, who worked as deputy chief of the National Intelligence Service from 2001 to 2003, was found hanging on Sunday evening at his home in Gwangju -- about 330km south of Seoul -- said Chung Yong-min, an officer at the Gwangju Seobu police station.
An autopsy on Lee's body showed the only cause of death was suffocation, Chung said.
His death comes less than a week after two former chiefs of the country's state intelligence agency were arrested and charged with overseeing the illegal wiretapping of cellphone conversations of about 1,800 of South Korea's political, corporate and media elite.
Lim Dong-won, 71, and Shin Gunn, 64, headed the agency successively between December 1999 and April 2003 under former president Kim Dae-jung. They have denied the charges.
Police declined to comment on why Lee might have taken his own life and no suicide note was found. But local media speculated that his death could be linked to his involvement in the scandal.
Prosecutors questioned Lee on three occasions, most recently on Nov. 11. Newspapers have reported that Lee's remarks to investigators helped prompt the ex-chiefs' arrests and that he had been tormented by psychological distress ever since.
Former president Kim -- a Nobel Peace Prize laureate -- has protested the arrests as "unreasonable."
His spokesman, Choi Kyung-hwan, has claimed their arrests were politically motivated.
North Korea also denounced the arrests yesterday, calling the move a US-instigated attempt by the South's political opposition to "bury key figures" who contributed to inter-Korean rapprochement.
In a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency, the North's Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland condemned the South's conservative opposition Grand National Party for the arrests, claiming they were politically motivated and aimed at the "suppression of progressive and reformist forces."
The former spy chief Lim had been a leading proponent of reconciliation with North Korea under Kim's "sunshine policy" of engaging the communist state.
These efforts earned him the nickname as the "preacher" of the sunshine policy.
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