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Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A senior South Korean intelligence official connected to the framing of a defector on spying charges has been sentenced to prison for leaking an undisclosed testimony. Seo Cheon-ho, the former second deputy chief of Seoul's National Intelligence Service, was charged with violating the Act on the Staff of National Intelligence and sentenced to a year in prison at Seoul Central District Court, Yonhap and News 1 reported Thursday.
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Two other former officials, Lee Tae-hee and Ha Gyeong-jun, each were sentenced to 10 months in prison with a stay of execution for two years. The defendants had disclosed to the press the confidential testimony and petitions of a witness, an unidentified North Korean defector, that were presented in court in March 2014. The defector was testifying against Yoo Woo-seong.
Yoo, an ethnic Chinese defector from North Korea, was a Seoul city employee accused at the time of giving away state secrets to Pyongyang. South Korean spies had falsified Yoo's immigration records to show Yoo "entering" and "exiting" North Korea multiple times from 1998 to 2006 in order to build their case. The defendants did not submit all documents on the case in 2014, however, when Yoo was under investigation, concealing evidence, including recordings of testimonies from China-based collaborators.
In 2015, two ethnic Korean-Chinese nationals were sentenced to two years and 1 1/2 years in prison, respectively, for abetting the forgeries.
Yoo, who began to work for the Seoul Metropolitan Government in 2004 as a contractor, was first prosecuted in 2013 on charges of sending intelligence on defectors resettled in the South through his sibling Yoo Ga Ryo. South Korea's Supreme Court later acquitted Yoo of spying charges.
Yoo was found not guilty of spying, but was charged with "unjustly" using a refugee resettlement grant from the South Korean government and for obtaining citizenship. Yoo was a member of the Chinese community in the North.
