The Seoul Administrative Court ruled in favour of the woman, an ethnic Korean identified only as Lee, a court spokesman said Wednesday. It reversed the justice ministry's decision to deny her refugee status.

Lee, who lived near the border, said she had helped some 20 refugees flee North Korea until police raided her house in March last year. Her husband was arrested but Lee escaped with her daughter.

She arrived in South Korea via the Yellow Sea along with other refugees aboard a fishing boat.

The justice ministry refused to grant Lee refugee status, saying her claim lacked credibility.

South Korean courts rarely grant such status to ethnic Koreans with Chinese nationality. Lee is only the second.

But the administrative court ruled last week that she could face harsh punishment if returned to China. "In this case, her past activities to help refugees in China were recognised by the court," the spokesman told AFP.

China is North Korea's sole major ally and repatriates those North Korean refugees it catches. It also punishes people who help the refugees.

On March 29 China arrested Kim Young-Hwan and three other South Korean activists who had been trying to help fugitives from the North. They were held for almost four months before being deported.

Kim said in Seoul that Chinese agents beat him, stopped him from sleeping for days and tortured him with electric shocks to collect information on activities by his group and its Chinese helpers.

China denied the torture claims but the South's government urged it to investigate further.

Guang Hua Liu, 41, was reported missing by friends on August 11, one day after they said they dropped her off outside of her now defunct spa, Inspector George Koekkoek told a televised press conference.

She was a Canadian citizen of Chinese descent who lived in the east side Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

"We are treating this as a homicide," Koekkoek said, adding that forensic testing had not yet determined the cause of her death.

Over the past week police recovered an arm, thigh and two calves from a creek in Scarborough as well as a foot, two hands and a head belonging to the victim from a park in Mississauga.

Hikers had stumbled upon a foot floating in the Credit River west of Toronto on Wednesday, triggering a massive search by police divers and sniffer dogs at Hewick Meadows Park where more body parts were found.

A passerby, meanwhile, alerted police over the weekend when he spotted an arm and leg in a creek on the east side of Canada's largest city. Those searches have now wrapped up.

"We're looking into a number of avenues, but the investigation is wide open," Koekkoek said when pressed by reporters about suspects in the murder.

Police have dismissed any link to the "Canadian Psycho" case involving Luka Rocco Magnotta, a male ex-porn actor suspected of killing a Chinese student with an ice pick in Montreal in May.

Magnotta, who is in jail awaiting a trial scheduled for early next year, is accused of carving up the victim's body, sexually abusing the corpse and filming the act, before posting a video of the killing online.

He is also suspected of having sent the victim's hands and feet to political party offices in Ottawa and to two schools in Vancouver through the mail.