A SENIOR executive with South Korean industrial giant Hyundai, whose business spearheaded reconciliation efforts with North Korea but ended up tangled in debt and scandal, leapt to his death from his 12th-floor office window yesterday.

SOUTH Korean envoys will travel to North Korea next week to discuss the standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, officials said yesterday.

South Korea will never tolerate its rogue neighbour’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, President Kim Dae-jung said today.

In the most serious border clash in three years, a North Korean navy boat with heavy-calibre weapons sank a South Korean patrol boat in the western sea today, the South Korean military said.

The flight recorder of an Air China plane carrying 166 passengers which crashed has been recovered, Transportation Ministry official Kim Young-woon said.