■KOREAS
Hyundai pays for detention
North Korea presented South Korea with a hotel bill for US$16,000 after detaining and interrogating one of its citizens in an inn for 137 days, an official said yesterday. Hyundai paid the bill for its employee when he was released this month from detention in the North’s border city of Kaesong, a company spokesman said. Yu Seong-jin, a 44-year-old engineer, returned home on Aug. 13 after being detained for insulting the North’s political system and for urging a local worker at the Kaesong joint industrial estate to defect. Yu was not beaten or tortured and was given adequate food and sleep, the South’s unification ministry said in a report on Tuesday. But he underwent day-long interrogations every day for three months, was verbally threatened and forced sometimes to kneel on the floor, it said.
■INDONESIA
Bomb suspect arrested
Police said yesterday they had arrested a second man suspected of helping to finance twin suicide bombings on hotels in Jakarta last month. The suspect, Muhamad Jibril Abdurahman, was caught by counterterror squad officers on Tuesday in the Pamulang area, west of Jakarta, police spokesman Nanan Soekarna said. Muhamad Jibril was linked to the network that carried out the attacks on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels that killed nine people, police said. He was a suspected accomplice of detained Saudi national Al Khalil Ali, who was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of channeling funds from abroad to pay for the attacks.
■SRI LANKA
Execution video fake: army
The military yesterday rejected a video clip broadcast in the UK allegedly showing its troops executing prisoners during the final stages of its battle against Tamil Tiger rebels. Army spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said the footage aired by Channel 4 in Britain was a fabrication to discredit security forces who defeated Tamil separatists in May. “This [video] was said to have been filmed at a time when the Tigers too were operating dressed in [Sri Lankan] military uniforms,” Nanayakkara said. The disturbing footage shows a man dressed in army uniform shooting a naked, bound and blindfolded man in the back of the head, while the bodies of eight others can be seen nearby in a muddy field. A 10th man was also shot in the same way toward the end of the video with men in the background gloating over the killings. In its report, Channel 4 stressed it could not verify the authenticity of the video which it received from a group called Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka. The group claims the video footage was taken in January by a soldier using a mobile phone.
■HONG KONG
Toxic face cream found
The Department of Health yesterday urged women not to use a face cream after laboratory tests showed it contained 43,266 times the acceptable level of mercury. The department issued the warning after a 58-year-old woman was admitted to hospital with mercury poisoning after using the cream. The woman fell sick early last month with headaches, dizziness, tremors and a tingling sensation on her feet after using the cream twice a day for a month. Officials are now investigating the source of the cream which has only a Chinese name. Mercury has long been used as a whitening agent in cosmetic creams, especially in Asia where pale skin is seen as a sign of beauty and nobility.
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