The South Korean government has appealed a court order to compensate a Vietnamese victim of atrocities committed by South Korean troops who had fought alongside U.S. forces during the Vietnam War, the defence ministry said on Thursday.
Nguyen Thi Thanh, 63, filed a suit against the South Korean government in 2020 seeking about 30 million won in compensation, saying she lost her family members and suffered wounds when South Korean marines killed about 70 civilians in her hometown in Vietnam's central province of Quang Nam in 1968.
In February, the Seoul Central District Court ordered the government to pay Nguyen 30 million won ($22,730), including money for the delay in compensation.
It marked the first legal acknowledgement of South Korea's liability for atrocities during the war. About 300,000 South Korean troops had fought in the war.
"We will fully cooperate with the trial proceedings under continued consultations with related agencies to receive an appellate ruling based on substantial truth," the ministry said in a statement to Reuters.
Vietnam's foreign ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said on Thursday that the South Korean government's move to appeal the ruling was "extremely regrettable."
"Vietnam's policy is to put aside the past and look towards the future but this does not mean that we deny the truth of history," Hang told a regular press conference in Hanoi.
(Reporting by Soo-hyang Choi; Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Hanoi; Editing by Robert Birsel & Simon Cameron-Moore)
