THURSDAY, APRIL 1, 2004
N Korea berates S Korean court over summit scandal
AP
SEOUL: North Korea denounced the South Korean Supreme Court as a "group of man-hunters'' on Thursday for sentencing officials for secretly transferring money to the communist country in 2000.
The Supreme Court on Sunday upheld the lower-court convictions of Lim Dong-won, an intelligence chief for former President Kim Dae-jung, and three others for illegally remitting US$100 million to North Korea ahead of a historic 2000 inter-Korean summit.
Pyongyang's Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a government agency in charge of economic exchanges with South Korea, on Thursday condemned the verdicts as "an anti-national act of deliberately laying a hurdle in the way of achieving reconciliation and unity between the North and the South.''
"The reality proves that the judicial authorities of South Korea, who are utterly indifferent to the desire of the fellow countrymen, are a group of man-hunters,'' a committee spokesman was quoted as saying by the North's official news agency KCNA.
North Korea considers the cash remittance as aid from the South, and has bristled at investigations of the convicted officials.
South Korean prosecutors launched their probes after the political opposition accused Kim of offering the money as a bribe to buy his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Although Kim Dae-jung was neither investigated nor indicted, the case damaged his reputation. The summit helped him win the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize.
In November, the Seoul High Court sentenced Lim to a suspended 18-month term, convicting him of helping South Korea's Hyundai business group win loans from a state bank and remit the funds to North Korea.
A Hyundai official and two former bank executives also received suspended prison terms for violating South Korea's foreign currency regulations.
President Kim finished his five-year term in February 2003. Before stepping down, he acknowledged that his government had helped Hyundai send North Korea US$500 million days before the summit. He said the money included US$100 million his government had promised to give the impoverished North.
Hyundai said the rest of the money was paid for the rights of tourism and other businesses in the isolated country.
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