Kim Jae-gyu, then South Korea's spy chief, shot and killed President Park on Oct. 26, 1979 and was executed in May the following year
More than four decades after his execution for assassinating President Park Chung-hee, South Korea’s former intelligence chief, Kim Jae-gyu, has been granted a retrial.
The Seoul High Court ruled on Wednesday in favor of reopening the case, nearly five years after Kim’s family first petitioned for a review. The decision comes 45 years after Kim was executed in May 1980 following a military trial.
Kim, then-director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was arrested and swiftly charged with homicide for the purpose of insurrection and attempted insurrection for shooting and killing then-President Park and the military strongman's chief bodyguard, Cha Ji-chul, on Oct. 26, 1979.
His first trial was held on Dec. 4, 1979, and the sentence of death was handed down 15 days later, on Dec. 20. He was executed after a Supreme Court appeal in May 1980.
However, in May 2020, Kim’s family filed for a retrial. They contended that his actions were in fact done out of "sacrifice for the people, the country and democracy."
As South Korea is a democratic republic, maintaining loyalty to someone acting as a king or dictator would have been an act of betrayal against the people and country, they said.
During court proceedings last year, lawyer An Dong-il, who defended Kim in his original trial, testified that the legal process had been deeply flawed.
“Whenever I talk about the Oct. 26 incident, I say it wasn’t a trial -- it was a joke,” An said. “I’m not one to speak harshly, but even after all these years, I still feel deep shame and anger over what happened.”
He described how at the time, witnesses were examined outside of the courtroom, without the participation of the defense team, and the records of this examination were not presented to the court.
Kim's defense attorneys also described how notes had been delivered to the Supreme Court justices, raising suspicions that the military junta had intervened in the case at the time. The justices eventually voted 7 to 13 to convict Kim and others involved in the assassination.
The court played an excerpt from Kim’s final statement before he was hanged. In the recording, he defended his actions, insisting that he had not sought power himself but had acted to refuse dictatorship.
“The purpose of the Oct. 26 revolution was to restore free democracy and prevent further bloodshed,” he said.
Park, a former Army general who had seized power in a military coup on May 16, 1961, was a military strongman who ruled the country for 17 years.
He is both one of the most popular presidents in the country's history and a highly-divisive figure here for his iron-fisted rule of Korea, with a 2019 survey by pollster Gongjeong of 1,006 adults showing that 46.1 percent of respondents view him as a "hero who led the country's economic growth," while another 46.1 percent said he was a "political dictator."
ssh@heraldcorp.com
