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World News See other World News Articles Title: She killed 115 people before the last Korean Olympics. Now she wonders: ‘Can my sins be pardoned?’ She killed 115 people before the last Korean Olympics. Now she wonders: ‘Can my sins be pardoned?’ The Washington Post Chico Harlan 4 hrs ago a man wearing a suit and tie standing in a dark room: Kim Hyon-hui in South Korea this week. Next Slide 1/3 SLIDES © Jun Michael Park/FTWP Kim Hyon-hui in South Korea this week. But now, the reminders of what Kim Hyon-hui once did again seem to be everywhere. South Korea is hosting the Winter Olympics this month, and even seeing the Olympic rings gives her flashbacks to 30 years ago, the other time this country was preparing to host the Games. Then, Kim was an elite North Korean agent. She was acting on national orders. She boarded a South Korean passenger plane, carrying a time bomb. She left the bomb in an overhead bin. She exited the plane during a layover. The plane blew up. There was a manhunt for the perpetrators. Kim was captured. And then, Kim was taken for the first time to South Korea, arrested for an act of terrorism that killed 115 people and was designed to derail the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. Thirty years later, Kim's life speaks to the disorienting contrasts on the Korean Peninsula, where the Olympics can be peaceful or deadly, unifying or dividing, and where a terrorist can become a housewife who says she's excited to watch the 2018 Games on TV. "In North Korea, I lived as Kim Il Sung's robot," Kim said in an interview. "In South Korea, I got to live a new life." Though Kim has tried to establish a mostly quiet existence, the issues that prompted her initial mission still resonate, with the Olympics, which begin Friday, again testing how the North will respond to a global celebration on the soil of its rival. In 1988, North Korea pushed to co-host the Summer Games, failed to strike a deal, and instead launched a campaign of violence aimed at making the event untenable. This time, the North and South agreed to march together in the Opening Ceremonies, sharing a flag and fielding a joint women's ice hockey team, a show of unity that belies years of tensions. Kim says that her deadly role in the bombing of Korean Air Lines Flight 858 is something that leaves her sorry and ashamed. "Can my sins be pardoned?" she said. "They probably won't be." Kim, who has given a handful of interviews about the bombing in recent months as the Winter Olympics approached, spoke expansively about her new life in South Korea. She no longer resembles the spy who was given eight years of physical and ideological training. She is 56 years old. She lives on the outskirts of South Korea's third-largest city. She wears glasses and keeps her hair short. She no longer practices taekwondo. She no longer has an interest in knife combat or code-cracking. But recently, she was watching television and saw another reminder of her past: footage of her arrival in South Korea, in December 1987, when she descended the steps of a plane, under arrest, surrounded by men in suits. At that moment, she wasn't yet cooperating with investigators. At that moment, she hadn't yet admitted she was a North Korean. At that moment, she had already once tried to kill herself rather than talk, and she was wearing a device on her mouth to prevent her from biting off her tongue. The first part of her life was ending, and Kim remembers never considering there would be a second part. "I feared interrogation," she said. "I thought it was the end. I thought I was in the last months of my life. In my head, I was singing a North Korean revolutionary song." Poster Comment: She no longer has an interest in knife combat or code-cracking? I suppose at some point you have to give up the things that mattered most. ;) Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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