Landlord gets life for sticky-tape murders

A landlord was jailed for life yesterday for murdering two women lodgers by suffocating them with sticky tape.

Kim Kyu Soo, 31, put one student victim in a suitcase that he dumped in a lane in North Yorkshire. The other was walled into a compartment at Kim's house in east London.

Police said after the trial at the Old Bailey that Kim, a South Korean who came to Britain in 2000 to study English, might have murdered other women, possibly abroad.

The court was told that Jin Hyo Jung, 21, and Song In Hea, 22, both students from South Korea, were renting rooms from Kim when they disappeared in 2001. "They were murdered in the most chilling and distressing circumstances," Jonathan Laidlaw, for the prosecution, said. The prosecution suggested Kim may have gradually suffocated the women to obtain their pin numbers. He later withdrew money from their bank accounts.

Kim from Holborn, central London, had denied murder. He admitted the manslaughter of Miss Song, but his plea was rejected by the prosecution.