BUSAN, Nov. 1 (Yonhap) -- A South Korean professor was sentenced to 30 years behind bars on Tuesday for killing his estranged wife and abandoning the corpse in collusion with his secret lover, a regional court said.

The Busan District Court delivered the jail term to the 53-year-old man surnamed Kang, a professor of computer criminology at a university in South Gyeongsang Province. His 50-year-old lover known only as Choi was given a 10-year imprisonment.

Kang was indicted earlier this year on charges of strangling his 50-year-old wife in his car at a hotel parking lot in the southern port city of Busan on April 2 and tossing the corpse packed in a bag into a river in the city.

He meticulously plotted and carried out this crime along with his lover, according to court records. Choi accompanied Kim in picking a place from which he would throw the body and helped him carry the corpse following the murder.

"He thoroughly preplanned the crime, fabricated his alibi and attempted to destroy evidence in order to cover it up as a missing case," Judge Kim Dong-yoon said. 

"A property issue seemed to have been the criminal motive," the judge said. "(Given) the defendant did not repent his wrongdoing and the victim's family appealed for a stern punishment, the severe sentence is inevitable."

Both of the convicted were involved in planning false alibis and attempting to destroy evidence with the criminology professor reformatting his computer, he noted.

At the time of the killing, the married couple was under a divorce suit to end their year-long marriage.

The victim was first reported to have gone missing, but police opened an investigation after her body was found afloat near an island within the city.