SAXParseException issue in Korean locale

A customer gets the following XML parsing error while migrating application from java
1.5 to 6.0. This happens only with Korean locale ( LANG=ko_KR.eucKR ). The bug is reproducible with JDK7 as well.
Attached the test case xml_test.zip to reproduce the failure.

The script from attachment to run:

$ sh jr.sh

The error message:

Error parsing XML. Cause:
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The string "--" is not permitted within
comments.
Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The string "--" is not
permitted within comments.
        at com.ibatis.common.xml.NodeletParser.parse
(NodeletParser.java:53)
        at com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.builder.xml.SqlMapParser.parse
(SqlMapParser.java:45)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.builder.xml.SqlMapConfigParser$11.process
(SqlMapConfigParser.java:390)
        at com.ibatis.common.xml.NodeletParser.processNodelet
(NodeletParser.java:112)
        at com.ibatis.common.xml.NodeletParser.process
(NodeletParser.java:75)
        at com.ibatis.common.xml.NodeletParser.process
(NodeletParser.java:93)