The Seoul High Court has reportedly decided to hold a retrial for an ethnic Korean resident of Kobe who served 15 years in a South Korean prison for spying for North Korea.
A South Korean court in July acquitted a South Korean resident of Kyoto, leading to another retrial of a Nara resident over spying cases involving ethnic Koreans from Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, but the case of Lee Hon Chi, 58, stands out because he was given one of the heaviest punishments.
The South Korean Defense Ministry said in a 2007 report there was a strong possibility that charges against Lee, who was first sentenced to death and then later to life in prison in an appeals court, had been falsified, making his acquittal almost certain in the coming retrial.