Seoul: A South Korean man was arrested last week for allegedly spying for Pyongyang and working with its military to kidnap activists who helped North Koreans defect, a Seoul official said on Monday.
The 55-year-old man took up the spy job after he met a female North Korean agent in 1999 in China`s eastern Shandong province, where he was engaged in drug trafficking, the official said on condition of anonymity because an investigation was ongoing.
The man, surnamed Kim, travelled to Pyongyang in 2000 for 15 days of spy training and received USD 10,000 and 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of narcotics from the North, the official said.
Kim was sent back to China and started abducting South Korean activists who were helping North Koreans defect from their impoverished, authoritarian homeland. The kidnapped Koreans were sent to the North in cooperation with the female agent, he said.
The man also kidnapped North Korean defectors hiding in China and forced them back to the North. He also tried to gather information on South Korean intelligence officers operating in Chinese towns near North Korea, the official said.
The official said he has no information on how many activists and defectors the man has kidnapped.
Activists claim tens of thousands of North Koreans live in hiding in China after fleeing the North to avoid a harsh political system, poverty and chronic food shortages. If repatriated, they could face severe punishment such as forced labour and years in prison, experts and activists say.
An undisclosed number of South Korean activists and missionaries also secretly operate in China to smuggle North Koreans from their homeland and shelter and feed defectors before they take refuge in South Korea, the US and elsewhere in the world.
The man was arrested on Thursday while making a temporary visit to South Korea, the official said.
A prosecutors` office in Seoul confirmed the arrest of the man but didn`t provide further details.
Yonhap news agency said the man has received narcotics from the North in return for his espionage operations in China. It cited the prosecution.
The two Koreas remain in a state of war, divided by a heavily fortified border, because their three-year conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953. More than 18,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the war`s end, with most of them coming via China.
Bureau Report
