"After the Oct. 26 incident, (we) have confined Choi Tae-min in a frontline military unit for a considerable period of time," Chun, a general-turned-president, said in the 2,000-page memoirs, referring to the 1979 assassination of then President Park Chung-hee.

Chun seized power through a military coup on Dec. 12, 1979 and ruled the country until 1988.

"(At the time), related agencies already knew in detail the fact that (Choi) had engaged in a series of wrongdoings on the back of (his close ties to) Park (Geun-hye), and this had troubled President Park Chung-hee," he noted, adding the detention was intended to keep him from committing more misdeeds.

The memoirs shed a new light on the decades-long relationship between Park and the Choi family which has drawn keen public attention amid the political scandal that has gripped the country since late October.

The relationship dates back to the 1970s when the late Choi, once a leader of a mysterious religious cult, began advising Park since her mother, Yook Young-soo, was assassinated by a North Korea sympathizer in 1974.

After Choi's death in 1994, his daughter, Soon-sil, is purported to have taken her father's place and advised Park -- a reason why some observers and media portray the relationship between Park and the junior Choi as "shamanistic."

In the memoirs, Chun also claimed that he accepted a constitutional revision in 1987 to enact a direct presidential vote, as he did not want to mobilize military forces during his term to quiet down growing public calls for a democratic presidential election.

Chun, however, has been much criticized for leading a bloody crackdown on a massive pro-democracy movement in May 1980 that resulted in hundreds of deaths. The clampdown was just four months before his inauguration.

In April 1997, the Supreme Court confirmed Chun's sentence of life imprisonment for the crackdown and other charges. But then-President Kim Young-sam also pardoned him in December of the same year under his "grand national harmony" campaign. (Yonhap)