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Four North Koreans seek asylum at US consulate in China

Four North Koreans overpowered a security guard and scaled the wall of a US diplomatic mission in China in hopes of gaining asylum from their native country, according to news reports yesterday.

The North Koreans entered the US consulate general in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang from the neighboring South Korean consulate by climbing over the wall separating the two compounds, South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper said.

security guard

A Chinese security guard employed by the Korean mission tried to stop them, but the North Koreans fended him off, the paper said.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency carried a similar report and described the three men and one woman as being in their 20s or 30s.

Neither Chosun nor Yonhap said when the incident took place.

Chosun Ilbo said that the North Koreans are ``in the asylum process'' to travel to the US for resettlement.

If their asylum bid is successful, it would be the second case of Washington accepting North Koreans as refugees.

Earlier this month, six North Koreans arrived in the US in the first such case.

refuge

The latest asylum seekers first took refuge at the South Korean consulate general in Shenyang and had been staying there for an unspecified period of time, waiting for a trip to South Korea.

After learning of the first case of North Koreans being admitted as refugees in the US, however, they asked South Korean officials to send them to the US consulate, the paper said.

The request was rejected and the North Koreans forced their way into the US mission, it said.

A US Embassy spokeswoman in Beijing said she could neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of the report.

South Korea's government declined to confirm the report. Foreign Ministry spokesman Choo Kyu-ho said that the government doesn't confirm anything related to North Korean defectors.

Rare

It is rare for North Koreans to take refuge at US diplomatic missions. Most North Koreans who have fled their impoverished communist homeland approach South Korean diplomatic missions and come to the South for resettlement.

Activists claim that tens of thousands of North Koreans live in China in hiding. Beijing views those North Koreans as ``economic migrants,'' not refugees, and is obligated to send them back under a bilateral treaty with Pyongyang.

More than 8,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, with about 5,700 of those arriving since 2002.

A total of 1,387 defectors arrived in the South last year.
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