A NORTH Korean spy described as "Asia's Mata Hari" has been jailed for five years after sleeping with army officers to get classified information and plotting their assassination.
Unsmiling but calm, Won Jeong Hwa, 34, was convicted on charges of leaking information to the North, including the locations of key military installations, lists of North Korean defectors and personal information on South Korean military officers.
Newspapers dubbed her Korea's version of "Mata Hari," the notorious First World War dancer-turned-spy, after prosecutors alleged Won used "sex as a tool" for her mission, dating a South Korean army officer and making him work for her.
Investigators also said she plotted to assassinate South Korean intelligence agents with poison-tipped needles, but did not carry out the plan.
Her sentence was handed down yesterday at Suwon district court, south of Seoul. The judge, Lim Min-sung, said: "The defendant approached soldiers and intelligence agents through the medium of sex and carried out secret espionage activities for a long time using her (purported] status as a defector."
Spying for North Korea is a crime in South Korea that carries the death penalty as a maximum sentence. However, in an earlier hearing, Won submitted a written statement to the court, admitting to the charges against her and offering repentance for her past activities as a spy.
In issuing its sentence the court also took into consideration that the information she sent to the North did not pose serious threats to the country's security and that she had since repented and co-operated with the investigation.
Won is the second North Korean spy arrested in South Korea in a decade.
The case further frayed South Korea's already troubled relations with the North, as the communist nation protested angrily that Seoul has fabricated the case to sully Pyongyang's image. North Korea has denied that Won is an agent, calling her "human scum".
Won posed as a refugee from Kim Jong-il's regime when she was granted asylum in South Korea and married a businessman, with whom she has a daughter, now aged seven.
All the while she was living a double life, consorting with army officers under orders from Pyongyang. Police found photographs and business cards belonging to 23 soldiers among her possessions.
Evidence produced at her trial in South Korea is said to have proved that Won persuaded information out of one of her long-term lovers, Captain Hwang.
She was also commissioned to seek out Hwang Jang-yop, the North's highest-ranking defector, who lives under armed guard in the South, and kill two of his South Korean agents with a poisoned needle.
She was convicted for taking part in the kidnapping of a South Korean businessman in China, who was smuggled over the border into the North.
The headline-grabbing case came to light in August, when Won was arrested along with her stepfather, Kim Dong-sun, 63. He is also being prosecuted on spying charges.
North and South Korea fought the 1950-53 war that ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically still at war.
The full article contains 533 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
