"When asked what was the party's signal, I remained silent, as I knew nothing about it. But I was tortured again, and said, 'the church bell,' that being the only thing I could think of at the time."
"I confessed to the whole prosecution story, but only as the result of torture, to which I was submitted nine times, fainting on two occasions, and being tortured again on revival," said Pak Chou-hyong. "I made my false confession under a threat that I and my whole family would be killed. I reiterated it at the Public Procurator's Office, where I was conducted by two policemen, one of them a man with a gold tooth, who boxed my ears so hard that I still feel the pain, and who told me not to vary my story.
"Fearing that my whole family would be tortured, I agreed. But when I arrived before the Public Procurator, I forgot what I had been taught to say, and wept, asking the officials to read what I had to confess. This they did, and I said, 'Yes, yes.'"
Choi Che-kiu, a petty trader, repudiated his confession of having gone with a party to Sun-chon.
"Had such a large party attempted to go to the station," he said, "they must infallibly have been arrested on the first day. Were I guilty I would be ready to die at once. The whole story was invented by officials, and I was obliged to acquiesce in it by severe torture. One night I was taken to Nanzan hill by two policemen, suspended from a pine tree and a sharp sword put to my throat. Thinking I was going to be killed, I consented to say 'Yes' to any question put to me."
"No force can make you tell such a story as this, unless you consent voluntarily," interposed the Court.
"You may well say that," replied the prisoner, grimly. "But with the blade of a sword in my face and a lighted cigarette pressed against my body, I preferred acquiescence in a story, which they told me that Kim Syong had already confessed, to death."
The prisoner paused, and the Judge looked at him with his head on one side. Suddenly the prisoner burst into a passion of weeping, with loud, incoherent cries.
In the previous trial one of the prisoners, Kim Ik-kyo, was asked why he admitted all the facts at his preliminary examination. "If the police were to go down Chong-no (one of the busiest streets in Seoul)," he replied, "and indiscriminately arrest a number of passers-by, and then examine them by putting them to torture, I am sure they would soon confess to having taken part in a plot."
The same thing was put in another way by a prisoner, Kim Eung-pong. He related a long story of torture by binding, hanging, beating and burning, continued for fifteen days, during which he was often threatened with death. Then he was taken to the "supreme enquiry" office of the police headquarters, where he was stripped naked and beaten with an iron bar from the stove. This office, he understood, had control and power of life or death over the whole peninsula, so he was compelled to confess all that they wanted. "I even would have said that I killed my father, if they put it to me," he added.