Man kills two in Ansan hostage standoff

A man killed his teenage stepdaughter and her biological father during a five-hour hostage-taking incident Tuesday.

The man is being held in police custody. Authorities believe that he carried out the attack because his wife refused to see him, and suspected that his wife was seeing her former husband, the father of her children.

The killer and the victim’s mother married in 2007 and is reported to have recently separated.

The situation began early Tuesday. Police in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, received a report at 9:36 a.m. that Kim was holding hostages and demanding that his ex-wife return to him.

The woman, who alerted the police, said that Kim was holding her two teenage daughters.

When the police arrived, Kim demanded to see his ex-wife. Police said that he was in a highly agitated state, shouting and cursing at her when she arrived to persuade him to release the hostages.

At about 2:30 p.m., after a five-hour standoff, the police entered the property Kim was holed up in and found the young hostages’ biological father dead. The police also found the critically injured younger daughter, who was immediately transported to a hospital but died due to her injuries.

According to the police, both victims were stabbed before negotiations began, and the young hostages’ father may have been dead since Monday.

The elder daughter was found unharmed, as was another woman who is thought to be a friend of her father.

By Choi He-suk (cheesuk@heraldcorp.com) and Lee Hyun-jeong (rene@heraldcorp.com)