Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

Episode 62: Kim Dae-jung Abduction (김대중 납치 사건)

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

Show Notes

On the afternoon of August the eighth, 1973, a man walked out of a hotel room on the twenty-second floor of a building in central Tokyo, and vanished. He was not a criminal. He was the man who had come within about eight percentage points — under a million votes — of beating the president of South Korea in a national election two years earlier. Five days later he turned up in an alley behind a filling station in Seoul, bruised, with a cut lip, and rang the doorbell of his own house like a man coming home from work. In between, he had been tied to a plank in the hold of a cargo ship with rocks lashed to his wrist and his ankle, listening to the men above him discuss how to make sure a body doesn't float. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for it. Not in Korea. Not in Japan. This is the story of the Kim Dae-jung abduction.

Kim Dae-jung Abduction (김대중 납치 사건) · 1973-08-08 · Hotel Grand Palace, Tokyo, Japan; Osaka and Amagasaki; the sea between Japan and Korea; Donggyo-dong, Seoul

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