North Korean Defector Surfaces in Pyongyang, Saying He Tried to Abduct Orphans

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/asia/north-korea-child-abduction-defector.html

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SEOUL, South Korea — A man who had defected to South Korea from the North turned up in a government-arranged news conference in the North’s capital on Friday, saying that he was arrested there this year while trying to smuggle orphans out of the impoverished country.

The man, Ko Hyon-chol, 53, confessed to trying to kidnap two North Korean orphaned girls and take them to the South at the behest of South Korean intelligence officers, Agence France-Presse reported from Pyongyang, the North’s capital.

“I committed the unpardonable crime of being involved in attempted child abduction,” Mr. Ko said as he cried during the news conference attended by foreign news media and diplomats.

Mr. Ko said he originally fled North Korea in 2013 after being involved in illegal smuggling and arrived in the South the next year.

In May, officers from the National Intelligence Service of South Korea asked him to arrange the kidnapping, promising $10,000 for each child, Mr. Ko said. He said he crossed the river border from China with an inflatable boat — which he planned to use to ferry back the girls — just after midnight on May 27 but was arrested hours later.

Mr. Ko’s comments could not be independently confirmed.

News conferences in North Korea are tightly choreographed events in which interviewees are not expected to say anything other than what the authorities allow them to. Mr. Ko frequently wept and called himself a “traitor of the fatherland” during the news conference, the agency said.

The South’s spy agency denied involvement. The country’s Unification Ministry accused the North of using Mr. Ko, a South Korean citizen, for propaganda and demanded that he be released.

More than 29,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the 1990s. Some of them became activists or human traffickers, often traveling to China to help North Korean refugees there reach the South or to help smuggle people from the isolated North. They operate near the border with the North under fear that they might be kidnapped by North Korean officers.

Several defectors to the South have appeared in news conferences in the North in recent years, accusing South Korean intelligence officers of abducting them and bitterly complaining about their lives in the capitalist South.

The countries have been bickering over the defection of 12 North Korean waitresses in China who arrived in the South in April. The North accused the South of kidnapping them, but the South said the women left of their own volition.

On Friday, South Korea also demanded that the North release three other South Koreans sentenced to a labor camp for life on charges of spying against the North or engaging in illegal religious activities there.

North Korea is also holding two Americans after sentencing them to long years of hard labor for what it called antistate crimes.