Lee Soo-il, 63, who worked as deputy chief of the National Intelligence Service from 2001 to 2003, was found dead by hanging Nov. 20 at his home in Gwangju, about 330 km south of Seoul, said Chung Yong-min, an officer at the Gwangju Seobu Police Station.

An autopsy on Lee's body showed the only cause of death was suffocation, Chung said.

His death came less than a week after two former chiefs of the country's state intelligence agency were arrested and charged with overseeing the illegal wiretapping of mobile phone conversations of about 1,800 of South Korea's political, corporate and media elite.

Lim Dong-won, 71, and Shin Gunn, 64, headed the agency successively between December 1999 and April 2003 under former President Kim Dae-jung. They have denied the charges.

Former President Kim -- a Nobel Peace Prize laureate -- has protested their arrests as "unreasonable."

The Japan Times Weekly: Nov. 26, 2005
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