NEW YORK (AP) – A young scion of the billionaire family that founded and controls the Samsung Group is believed to have committed suicide, the company and police said Saturday, contradicting initial reports that she had been killed in a car crash.

The body of Lee Yoon-hyung, the 26-year-old daughter of Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, was discovered by her boyfriend and a friend during a 3 a.m. visit to her Manhattan apartment on Nov. 19.

Lee, who had been studying arts management as a graduate student at New York University, appeared to have hung herself with an electrical cord, a police spokesman said.

Investigators were waiting for additional information from the city’s medical examiner before closing the case, said police Detective Dennis Laffin.

News agencies in South Korea, relying, in part, on information from Samsung, had initially reported Tuesday that Lee died in a car wreck. But prompted by renewed inquiries from reporters, Samsung Group spokesman Yim Joon-seok acknowledged Saturday that Lee had taken her own life, without providing other details.

“We didn’t mean to intentionally hide the facts,” Yim said, adding that company officials initially didn’t have full knowledge of how Lee had died.

Media speculation has been rampant over the cause of Lee’s death this week in South Korea.

The Yonhap news agency reported that Lee had suffered from severe depression after her parents disapproved of marriage with her boyfriend, but it based the claim on a source it did not identify.

The death comes at a time of strain for the Lee family.

Last month, a court in Seoul, South Korea convicted two Samsung executives on charges that they had allowed Lee Kun-hee’s son and three daughters to buy company bonds at below-market prices.

The transaction, which took place in 1996 when Lee Yoon-hyung was still a teenager, earned the family $93 million in illegal profits, prosecutors said.

The company also recently agreed to plead guilty to price fixing in the United States and pay a $300 million fine to the U.S. government.

Samsung was founded in the late 1930s as a small, Lee family business exporting fish and vegetables, but grew into a top producer of consumer electronics and the world’s largest maker of memory chips.

The Lee family is among the world’s wealthiest.

AP-ES-11-26-05 1432EST