Pyongyang: In a rare news conference by a repatriated North Korean defector, a woman claimed she was tricked into defecting six years ago by South Korean agents but was welcomed by the North when she returned in May.
Pak Jong Suk made the account to local and foreign reporters yesterday at the People`s Palace of Culture in Pyongyang. The 66-year-old`s story could not be independently confirmed.
"I am an ingrate who had betrayed my motherland to seek better living while others devoted themselves to building a thriving nation, tightening their belts," Pak, clad in a pink traditional Korean dress, told reporters in Pyongyang.
South Korea`s Unification Ministry said today that the woman lived in a neighbourhood in eastern Seoul under a different name, Park In-sook, but would not provide further details.
North Korean defector and activist Park Sang-hak said in Seoul that he and the woman lived in the same apartment complex. He remembers her only as an "ordinary woman" who made no political comments to him.
It is unusual for North Korea to hold and televise a news conference for foreign as well as local media featuring ordinary citizens, particularly a former defector.
It was not possible to immediately verify whether Pak spoke on government orders or of her own volition, but her comments are in line with North Korea`s efforts to rebut recent claims by rights activists and the US that it abuses repatriated defectors.
A Unification Ministry spokeswoman, Park Soo-jin, said during a briefing in Seoul that there was at least one other known case of a North Korean defector returning to Pyongyang from the South and giving a news conference: A defector surnamed Yoo entered South Korea illegally in 1998, then returned to Pyongyang in 2000 and spoke to the media before coming back again to the South in 2001. The defector now lives in South Korea.
During her news conference, Pak said she slipped undetected across the Tumen River from the North Korean city of Chongjin into China in March 2006, after being promised that she would be reunited with her father in the Chinese city of Qingdao.
She said she hoped to get money from her father, who went to the South during the Korean War. She said that three months later, after paying smugglers, she was tricked by South Korean intelligence agents into boarding a boat that landed in South Korea.
PTI
