The Presidential Commission on Suspicious Deaths said Monday, Seoul National University Professor Choi Jong-kil was probably murdered by members of the then Korean Central Intelligence Agency, rather than committing suicide during interrogation as reported in 1973 by the agency.
The committee said that Choi appeared to have been thrown from the seventh floor of the KCIA building in Namsan either unconscious, or already dead after being tortured by the agency. Nine committee members voted for the conclusion unanimously, and ordered compensation evaluation for his surviving family and the restoration of his honor.
A commission member said, at the time Choi had refused to make any confession regarding the agency's plan to protect the Revitalizing Reform (Yushin) system, and his death was clearly related to the democratization movement considering its impact on the anti-Yushin movement.
However, the committee decided not to request prosecution or investigation into people related with Choi's death, including those who wrote the false report or were party to the torture. The late Choi's son Choi Gwang-jun, a professor of law at Kyunghee University said, "from the very beginning, I believed my father died from torture," adding that the decision signified the first admission by a government agency.
The fact-finding commission has concluded 16 out of 85 cases, of which three cases, including Choi, were concluded as government colluded deaths, with 12 rejected and one dropped.
(Jeong Woo-sang, imagine@chosun.com)
