A Seoul appellate court on Wednesday upheld a two-year jail sentence for a graduate student who attacked a professor with a homemade bomb last year.

According to the judges of the Seoul High Court, the defendant, a mechanical engineering student at Yonsei University in Seoul, had spent more than two weeks making a bomb from a coffee tumbler in June last year.

The crime “is far beyond what society can tolerate and deserves strict punishment,” the judges explained in their sentence.

The graduate student, identified only by his surname Kim, planned his crime to inflict injury on a professor after being scolded concerning his thesis. Kim was reportedly upset with the professor who had been his supervisor and consistently reproached him during research. 

The bomb, made with gunpowder and nails, caused minor burns to the professor who found it inside a shopping bag disguised as a gift, hanging from the doorknob to his office.

The Seoul Western District Court handed down a jail sentence of two years in November last year, saying Kim’s actions were premeditated and closely planned out. Prosecutors had originally sought a five-year jail term.

By Cho Yun-myung (yunc39@heraldcorp.com)