Dancer's job goes belly-up over fake degree

S. Korea's fake degree scandal has spread far and wide:

South Korean prosecutors said Monday they have charged a well-known belly dancer with forging an undergraduate degree to get a job teaching the skill at university.

Ahn Yoo-Jin will face trial for allegedly forging a graduation certificate from a university in Sydney, Australia. She used it to get a job as a part-time lecturer in belly dancing at Kwangju Women's University in 2006 but has now been sacked from the post, Yonhap news agency reported.

Ahn, also known as Xena Ahn, is the head of the Korea Belly Dance Association. She established the Belly Korea Academy in 1995 and hosted several televised belly dance lectures.

South Korea's fake degree scandal has spread far and wide since it erupted in early July, when prosecutors investigated Dongkuk University professor Shin Jeong-Ah for fabricating a Yale doctorate.

A probe followed into the academic backgrounds of thousands of professors and civil servants.

In recent months dozens of figures from the cultural, entertainment and religious worlds have either confessed to faking their academic records or were found out.

AFP