Lee Geun-an, a former South Korean police inspector notorious for violently coercing dozens of activists and ordinary citizens into confessing to fabricated espionage charges during the country’s military dictatorship, has died. He was 88.
Officials at Dongbu Hospital in Seoul said Mr. Lee had died on Wednesday and that his funeral service was held at its mortuary on Friday. Relatives interviewed briefly at the hospital would not disclose the cause of death, but said he had spent his final years in a care facility for elderly people with terminal illnesses.
His victims never knew his name when they were dragged into his interrogation cells. They called him “the torture master” and bandalgom — the black bear once common across the Korean Peninsula — remembering him as a heavyset man with thick hands and a monstrous gift for breaking bodies and minds. When his identity was finally made public in the late 1980s, it became a symbol of one of the darkest chapters of the military strongman Chun Doo-hwan’s rule.
Mr. Chun had seized power in a coup in 1979 and suppressed an anti-government uprising with a blood bath the following year. As students took to the streets and workers organized strikes in the years that followed, his government rounded up dissidents and branded them pro-North Korean spies — a strategy designed to invoke the threat from the North and justify authoritarian rule at home.
Confessions, fabricated without evidence, were extracted through torture. Mr. Lee was so accomplished that anti-espionage interrogators across the country requested his services.
He traveled with a suitcase containing a tracksuit and running shoes, which he changed into before beginning his sessions — sometimes chewing gum throughout. His methods, documented in victim testimony and government reports, included strapping people to a board and pouring water laced with hot-pepper powder over a towel covering their faces; stripping them naked, soaking them and giving them electric shocks; and dislocating their bones with his bare hands.
“While his victim was writhing in pain, he had no trouble sleeping on a cot in the corner of the interrogation room, snoring loudly,” Park Jong-deok, who was tortured by Mr. Lee in 1983, told the national broadcaster KBS in a 2004 documentary. “He knew how to crush the last vestige of his victim’s human dignity.”
Mr. Lee liked to boast that he could crack a case with a single ballpoint pen: He would beat a person until his body was severely swollen, then jab the inflamed flesh with the pen’s tip.
“The reason we called him the torture master was that he knew how to take us to the edge of death and then stop,” Ham Ju-myong, who suffered at Mr. Lee’s hand in 1983, said years later. “He was the devil from hell who could make his victim confess to anything. I still wake up at night in a cold sweat.”
Mr. Lee wrote his interrogation reports in impeccable handwriting, consulting a dictionary he always carried. When he misspelled a word, he did not cross it out — he tore the page off and started again.
Born in Yangju, near what became the North Korean border, in 1938, Mr. Lee served in the South Korean air force before joining the national police in 1970. He rose quickly through its counterespionage bureau on the strength of his methods. In 1986, Mr. Chun awarded him a government medal.
Mr. Chun’s rule began to unravel in 1987 after mass protests erupted following the death of a college student during a waterboarding session. Survivors — among them the celebrated dissident Kim Geun-tae — began calling publicly for the arrest of the torturer whose face they knew but whose name they did not. When the liberal newspaper Hankyoreh published his identity and photograph in 1988, Mr. Lee mailed in his resignation and disappeared.
The police sought to arrest him, and victims’ groups offered a reward for information on his whereabouts. Rumors spread that he had fled the country or undergone plastic surgery. Neither proved true when he surrendered to police in 1999 — the most notable change in his appearance being a pair of missing front teeth. He revealed that he had spent part of his time as a fugitive inside his home in Seoul, hiding in a compartment.
He was sentenced to seven years in prison for the torture of Kim Sung-hak, a fisherman held illegally for 73 days. Many convictions built on coerced confessions were later overturned, a process made possible only after South Korea’s democratization.
After his release in 2006, Mr. Lee was ordained as a Christian pastor. He remained unrepentant, dismissing his victims’ accounts as exaggerated and describing his methods as “not torture” but “a sort of art.” He was defrocked by his denomination in 2012 following public outrage over similar remarks he made after the release of a film partly based on his career. He died in poverty, unable to pay damages courts had awarded to victims’ families.
“His death cannot erase the atrocities he committed or the suffering of his victims,” the Korea Democracy Foundation said in a statement.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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