A masseur accused of killing a university student has confessed to her death — and to strangling six other women over the past two years, police south of Seoul said yesterday.
Kang Ho-sun, 38, was arrested on Saturday last week at his workplace in Ansan, a city about 30km south of Seoul, in connection with the killing of a student who disappeared last month. Her body was found in a nearby town last Sunday, police said.
Kang on Thursday confessed to kidnapping and killing the student — and six other women between December 2006 and November last year, said Park Hak-geun, a senior police official in Suwon, the capital of Gyeonggi Province.
PHOTO: AP
Kang is also suspected in the 2005 arson deaths of his fourth wife and her mother, Yonhap news agency reported.
Police said Kang told them he approached his victims for sex — or with the intent to rape them — and then strangled them with a pair of stockings, Park said at a briefing yesterday. Kang said he then buried their bodies.
“I couldn’t suppress my urges after committing the first murder,” investigators quoted Kang as saying.
Police said Kang had lived since 2006 on a farm in Suwon, a city of about 1 million people about 30km south of Seoul, and was working as a sport massage therapist.
He pointed investigators to spots within a 7km radius of the farm, where he said he buried the bodies. Investigators were working yesterday to locate the bodies.
The six other women were identified as a 48-year-old Suwon housewife who disappeared on her way home, three karaoke bar employees, a 52-year-old office worker and another college student.
Kang has a criminal record that includes theft and other offenses, and was accused of rape in January last year, police said.
He also is suspected of setting fire to his home in Ansan three years ago — a blaze that killed his fourth wife and her mother — and collecting insurance payouts afterward. He had registered their marriage just five days before the fire broke out, Yonhap said.
Kang has denied setting the fire. Police said the suspect told investigators he felt “lost” after his wife’s death and developed the urge to kill about a year later.
South Korea’s worst serial killing spree in decades was carried out by Yoo Young-chul, a thief and sexual predator who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2004 for killing 20 people, mostly prostitutes and wealthy older people.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS