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| A woman suspected of killing her children covers her face as she is taken to a police vehicle at Ulsan Jungbu Police Station in Ulsan, South Gyeongsang Province, in this Sept. 15 file photo. The suspect has been extradited to New Zealand, the Ministry of Justice said Tuesday. Newsis |
By Jung Min-ho
A 42-year-old woman, who is suspected of killing her two children, has been extradited to New Zealand.
According to the Ministry of Justice, Tuesday, the woman, surnamed Lee, is a New Zealand citizen of Korean descent and was handed over along with evidence to the New Zealand authorities the previous day at Incheon International Airport.
The woman came into the spotlight in August after a family in Auckland found the bodies of a 10-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy in two suitcases they purchased with other "abandoned goods" at an online auction. Police believe that the bodies had been kept there for several years.
It was the first extradition request Korea received from New Zealand, the ministry noted.
"We hope that the truth of this case will be revealed through a fair and strict judicial process in New Zealand," the ministry said in a statement. "Extradition proceedings take a long time in most cases. But this particular case took only three months … This sets a good precedent for efficient international cooperation in criminal investigations."
Many questions surrounding the case remain unanswered: What was the motive behind the alleged killings and were there any accomplices? Some of these will be answered after the trial begins Wednesday on the two murder charges. According to New Zealand media reports, the woman is expected to appear at Manukau District Court.
The woman was arrested in September in the southern port city of Ulsan, where she had been staying in her friend's apartment. She has denied the allegations.
Lee immigrated to New Zealand where she obtained citizenship and later married a man, with whom she is known to have had two children. Her husband reportedly died of cancer in 2017.
Following her arrest, Oh Yoon-sung, a professor at the department of police administration at Soonchunhyang University, told the Hankook Il-bo, the sister paper of The Korea Times, that Lee may have been under enormous stress after losing her husband.
The next year, she returned to Korea alone and lived in Seoul until early this year.
Korea has signed extradition treaties with nearly 80 countries, including New Zealand in 2002. Yet proceedings for this case have been unusually fast. Given that a state does not have any obligation to surrender an alleged criminal to another for many reasons, including the suspect's claim of political persecution or possible human rights abuses, it takes, if ever, years to conclude in many cases.
After reviewing the case, Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon said the ministry decided to send her back on the grounds that the suspect and the victims are all citizens of New Zealand (therefore, the case is beyond the Korean government's jurisdiction), the horrific nature of the alleged crime and Korea's national interest.
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