SEOUL, March 11, 2008 (AFP) - A South Korean former baseball star has been found dead hours after police named him as a suspect for the murder of a woman and her three daughters, investigators said Tuesday.

Police said Lee Ho-Seong, a star hitter who led Haitai Tigers, now called Kia Tigers, to four Korean Series wins in the 1990s, had apparently committed suicide by walking into the Han River.

Since retirement however, a series of failed business ventures had left him facing huge debts.

The manhunt was launched after police Monday found the bodies of the women buried together in a pit at a cemetery in Hwasun County, about 300 kilometres (187 miles) south of Seoul.

Police said Lee, 41, and the 45-year-old woman had been lovers, but that he had come under pressure from her to repay around 177,000 dollars she had lent him.

A labourer said he had dug the pit, next to the tomb of Lee's father, at the request of a man who looked like Lee.

Police ordered the hunt after obtaining closed-circuit television pictures of Lee carrying large bags in and out of her Seoul apartment on the evening of February 18, since when the four have been missing.

They released a photograph of Lee and offered a reward of 3,000 dollars for information leading to his capture.

'No injuries or bruises were found on his body,' a police chief detective, Lee Moon-Soo, told journalists in Seoul.

He said no suicide note was found but that Lee reportedly sent a letter to one of his relatives hinting he might kill himself.

Lee retired in 2001 and turned to his hand to business affairs.

An initially thriving wedding business in the southwestern city of Gwangju, the Tigers' home, went bankrupt, and subsequent ventures in real estate and a virtual horse racing arcade landed him with huge debts.