Attack on envoy part of S. Korea’s violent protest past
Man with knife slashes U.S. ambassador
Seoul, South Korea —A knife attack Thursday that injured the U.S. ambassador to South Korea is the latest act of political violence in a deeply divided country where some protesters portray their causes as matters of life and death.
The slashing of Ambassador Mark Lippert’s face and arm, which left deep gashes and damaged tendons and nerves, was an extreme example, but America infuriates some leftist South Koreans because of its role in Korea’s turbulent modern history.
Washington, which backed the South during the 1950-’53 Korean War against the communist North, still stations nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea and holds annual military drills there. That is something anti-U.S. activists view as a major obstacle to their goal of an eventual reunification of the rival Koreas.
Purported U.S. interference in Korean affairs appeared to be the main grievance of the man police named as the assailant, Kim Ki-jong, 55, who is well-known among police and activists as one of a hard-core group of protesters willing to use violence to highlight their causes.
“South and North Korea should be reunified,” Kim shouted as he slashed Lippert with a 10-inch knife, police and witnesses said.
Lippert, 42, was recovering well but still complaining of pain in the wound on his left wrist and a finger where doctors repaired nerve damage, Severance Hospital official Yoon Do-Heum said in a televised briefing. Doctors will remove the 80 stitches on Lippert’s face on Monday or Tuesday and expect him to be out of the hospital by Tuesday or Wednesday. Hospital officials said he may experience sensory problems in his left hand for several months.
Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said it was the first time that a foreign ambassador stationed in modern South Korea had been injured in a violent attack.
However, the Japanese ambassador narrowly escaped injury in 2010 when Kim threw a piece of concrete at him, police said. Kim, who was protesting Japan’s claim to small disputed islands that are occupied by South Korea, hit the ambassador’s secretary instead, media reports said, and was sentenced to a three-year suspended prison term.
Kim told police that he attacked Lippert to protest U.S.South Korean military drills that started Monday, which he said ruined efforts for reconciliation between the two Koreas, officials at Seoul’s Jongno police station said in a televised briefing.
North Korea’s state-controlled media later crowed that Kim’s “knife slashes of justice” were “a deserved punishment on war maniac U.S.” and reflected the South Korean people’s protests against the U.S. for driving the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war because of the joint military drills.