SEOUL
A South Korean court sentenced the head of a left-leaning traditional dance company to four years in jail Tuesday for reporting on domestic politics to a North Korean spy.
The Seoul Central District Court found Jeon Shik-ryeol guilty of violating the country's National Security Law, which bans South Koreans from unauthorized contact with the North's communist regime.
"The suspect should be sternly punished in light of the fact that he met a North Korean intelligence agent and wrote an oath of loyalty toward Pyongyang, which eventually threatened national security," judge Kim Jong-ho ruled, according to South Korea's national Yonhap news agency.
The 44-year-old - the head of eight-member dance company Chool, and also a member of the minor opposition leftist Unified Progressive Party (UPP) - was reported to have visited China's most populated city Shanghai in 2011 to contact the spy at the request of another agent he had known in Japan, court officials said.
The suspect then returned home, and wrote the oath of loyalty using a computer program that automatically encodes a secret message into graphic images, the officials added.
The court said that he had also passed on details of a factional political feud in the UPP in 2012.
Earlier this year, a UPP legislator was sentenced to 12 years in prison after a district court indicted him for plotting a rebellion to overthrow the South's government.
Prosecutors ruled his plan posed a "grave" national security threat.
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