Man wrongly incarcerated for 'spying for NK' compensated 54 years late

An 82-year-old man who served a seven-year prison term after being wrongly accused of being a North Korean spy will receive compensation from the state, over 50 years after the conviction.

Seoul High Court on Oct. 4 ruled that Kim Sin-geun should get compensation worth 901.2 million won ($664,000) as "criminal compensation," after he was exonerated from the charges back in July.

Kim, who was a Korea University graduate student in the 1960s, was accused of conducting espionage activities for North Korea while studying abroad at Cambridge University in the UK in 1966. He was charged with "reading books on socialism" while abroad, "making contact with a North Korean agent" and "delivering a directive letter," and was sentenced to seven years in jail in 1970.

Some 30 years later in 2009, the state-run Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea found that the investigation had accompanied a wide range of illegal actions by three agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who held Kim for eight days without notifying him of the reason for his arrest or a warrant, before imprisoning him in a detention center and subjecting him to torture, assault and abuse until he wrote statements as the agents demanded.

In a retrial requested by Kim in 2022, the court that Kim was illegally detained, and his confession had been forced by torture including waterboarding, assault and electrocution. It said that most of the evidence against Kim was illegal and the rest did not support the possibility that Kim could pose any kind of threat to the nation, confirming his innocence after 54 years in July.

This so-called "European spy ring" incident claimed other victims as well: then-international law professor, the late Park No-su, and then-lawmaker, the late Kim Gyu-nam were both accused of being spies for North Korea. Park and Kim were sentenced to death in 1970 and executed in 1972.

After the aforementioned investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Supreme Court cleared both of their names in 2015, 43 years after their deaths.