Family members of the eight innocent people sentenced to death for their alleged attempt to reconstitute the banned People's Revolutionary Party protest as the Supreme Court upholds the sentence on April 8, 1975 Another Probe Into the Past Provides Familiar Answers Court Clears Defendants in 1975 Summary Execution Judgment Restores Honor of Judicial Murder Victims 60 Years of the Republic: The Party of Progress Incident Documents Exonerate Korean ‘Mata Hari' After 55 Years Guns Fall Silent at U.S. Training Site Historic Spying Case Was Inflated, NIS Finds U.S. 'Condoned Summary Executions During Korean War'

In other investigations as part of an ongoing review of the secret services’ darker past, the NIS committee also found that agents used torture to extract false confessions in the 1975 episode as well as two earlier ones, the original People's Revolutionary Party incident of 1964 and the National Democratic Young Student League incident of 1974.

Chief investigator Ahn Byung-wook said it was “reasonable to conclude” that the order came from the president, given that the men were sentenced to death on April 8, the same day that the notorious Presidential Emergency Decree No. 7 was enacted, “and the execution needed the close cooperation of the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of Justice." The committee made it clear that the victims in the two other incidents “were unfairly accused of being insurgents as a result of the investigation policy of the [now defunct] Korea Central Intelligence Agency.”

(englishnews@chosun.com )