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Lee Geun-an, infamous torture interrogator, dies at 88
Lee Geun-an speaks during a book launch event for his autobiography in Seoul in 2012. Yonhap
By Park Ung
Lee Geun-an, a former police investigator who became a symbol of state violence under Korea's military dictatorship and was known as the regime's "master torturer," died Wednesday. He was 88.
Lee joined the police force in 1970 and later served as a counter-espionage investigator. During the 1980s, he extracted false confessions from suspects through electric shock and water torture while investigating cases involving alleged communist sympathizers. Among his victims was the late Kim Geun-tae, a former health and welfare minister who suffered lasting health complications.
His name and face became publicly known only in 1988 through media reports, prompting him to submit his resignation by mail and vanish. After 11 years as a fugitive, he turned himself in in 1999 and was tried on charges of illegally detaining and torturing fishermen abducted to North Korea and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Released in 2006, he briefly served as a Protestant pastor before being removed from the ministry in 2012, the same year he drew public outrage at a memoir launch saying, “At the time, I thought catching ideological criminals was patriotism.”
In a statement Thursday, the Korea Democracy Foundation said “His death cannot erase the atrocities he committed, nor will the suffering of victims etched in the history of democracy ever disappear,” adding that Lee died without offering a sincere apology to torture victims and their families.