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Lee Geun-an, notorious as a torture specialist during South Korea’s military regimes, has died at the age of 88.
Lee had been staying in a nursing hospital in Seoul after his health declined and died on the 25th. His body is currently at a hospital in Dongdaemun, Seoul. Funeral rites are scheduled for the 27th.
He served as a counterintelligence investigator at the Public Security Headquarters in the 1970s and 1980s and became infamous for brutal interrogation techniques, including water torture (waterboarding), electric shocks and dislocating suspects’ joints.
Lee was involved in investigations such as the 1979 Namminjeon case, the 1985 fabricated spy case against abducted fisherman Kim Seong-hak, and the 1986 Anti-Imperialist Alliance case. Authorities say he tortured suspects during those probes. In 1981, he received a commendation from the minister of home affairs for his role in the Seoul National University Murim case.
After South Korea’s democratization, Lee was placed on a wanted list in December 1988 on charges of torturing Kim Geun-tae, the former leader of the Youth Federation for the Democratization Movement, and he spent 12 years on the run.
He surrendered in October 1999. In September 2000, the Supreme Court sentenced him to seven years in prison and imposed a seven-year suspension of civil rights; he was released in 2006. In 2024, a court ordered him to pay 700 million KRW (about $469,000) to the family of an abducted fisherman who had been detained as a suspected spy and died in custody.
After his release, Lee participated in religious activities and said he regretted his past, but he continued to make controversial remarks. In a 2010 interview, when asked about being called a “torture specialist,” he said, “Those who try to defend themselves and investigators who try to break them engage in an intense battle of wits. In that sense, interrogation is an art.”
At a 2012 event marking the publication of his autobiography, he defended past actions, saying, “Catching spies and ideological offenders back then was patriotic. If it weren’t patriotism, who would have risked their lives working so hard?”
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