Episode 62: Kim Dae-jung Abduction (김대중 납치 사건)

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries · Sep 13, 2026 · 35m

On the afternoon of August the eighth, 1973, a man walked out of a hotel room on the twenty-second floor of a building in central Tokyo, and vanished. He was not a criminal. He was the man who had come within about eight percentage points — under a million votes — of beating the president of South Korea in a national election two years earlier. Five days later he turned up in an alley behind a filling station in Seoul, bruised, with a cut lip, and rang the doorbell of his own house like a man coming home from work. In between, he had been tied to a plank in the hold of a cargo ship with rocks…