Robber who stripped store staff arrested in S.Korea

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The scandal shaking up South Korea's main spy agency is not cloak-and-dagger stuff, but the kind of low-grade trickery anyone with an Internet connection could pull off. And the target was not Seoul's opaque rival to the north, but the country's own people.

Shigeo Iizuka still has the black-and-white photo of his little sister, Yaeko, stuck on the inside cover of his pocket diary.

A South Korean man received a suspended jail term Tuesday for retweeting messages from North Korea's official website in the first such case since the communist state launched a cyber propaganda campaign.The Seoul Central District Court said it had handed the 55-year-old man identified only as Cho a two-year jail sentence, suspended for three years, for violating South Korea's security law.The man was convicted of retweeting material from the North's Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/uriminzok) to about 3,000 followers last year, it said.

LONDON — Two Muslim hardliners say the man seen wielding a bloody butcher’s knife after the killing of a British soldier is a Muslim convert who took part in demonstrations with the banned radical group al-Muhajiroun. Meanwhile, British police on Thursday evening announced the arrests of two more suspects in the case. Police said a man and a woman, both aged 29, were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.

South Korean police said Sunday they had arrested three men suspected of making homemade explosives that caused two minor blasts in Seoul last week.The three men aged from their late 30s to early 50s are suspected of making two time bombs with butane gas canisters and putting them in luggage lockers at Seoul train station and an express terminal in the south of the capital.No casualties were reported from the blasts that occurred about 30 minutes apart on Thursday, and damage was minor.

Two female refugees from North Korea have been arrested in South Korea for allegedly forcing fellow fugitives into prostitution while they were in China, police said Tuesday.The case is a rare attempt to punish refugees for crimes in China, where many women who have fled the North are sexually exploited.Police said that over a two-year period the pair acquired 70-80 North Korean women fresh from their impoverished homeland, about half of them from Chinese brokers.They paid the brokers about 3.6 million South Korean won ($3,298) for each woman.

A knife-wielding Japanese man went on the rampage on two packed buses on Friday, slashing at least four people in an incident that left 13 injured, mostly school students, police and media reports said.Police said they had arrested a 27-year-old unemployed man identified as Yuta Saito after the attacks during the morning rush hour outside Toride railway station, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) northeast of Tokyo."The suspect got onto the buses and wielded a knife and slashed passengers in there," said a police spokesman in Toride, Ibaraki prefecture.