Editor TLN
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The specialized news website NK News published excerpts from a rare testimony sent by a North Korean defector from a South Korean prison where he is being held. He recounts the dangerous spiral that led him to pass information to North Korea and the pressures on the more than 30,000 people who have left the Kim kingdom, often leaving their loved ones behind.
With our correspondent in Seoul, Nicolas Rocca.
Mr. Kim (pseudonym) came to South Korea as a teenager, and was long a successful example of North Korean integration. For more than a decade, the physical therapist had a comfortable life until his past caught up with him.
In the letters sent to NK News, he explains that in 2018 his brother, who had stayed in North Korea, called him to say that someone wanted to meet him. He then went to the North Korea-China border, where a Pyongyang official told him that he would have to give information about other defectors, or his family would be in danger.
Mr. Kim cooperated while trying to get his relatives to flee, financing this costly project through a smuggling ring, sometimes becoming a trafficker.
Double game
But in 2019, the South Korean police arrested him. Branded a “spy” by Seoul, Mr. Kim rejects these accusations and says that he has played a double game by not giving any valuable information to Pyongyang.
According to him, he was only trying to protect his family, but he broke the National Security Law and was sentenced to three years in prison last June. He says that by leaving it, he will leave his adopted country and move away from the two Koreas.
