Seoul yesterday urged Pyongyang to immediately release two of its citizens detained in North Korea over alleged espionage.
North Korea’s state media said late on Thursday that the two were detained last year for allegedly collecting confidential state information and attempting to spread “bourgeois lifestyle and culture” in the North at the order of South Korea’s spy agency and the US.
It identified the men as Kim Kuk-gi and Choe Chun-gil and said the two acknowledged their acts during what was described as a news conference in Pyongyang.
Authorities in Pyongyang have in the past staged news conferences during which foreign detainees appeared before the media and made statements that they recant after their releases.
Yesterday, the South Korean Ministry of Unification confirmed that Kim and Choe were South Korean citizens, but denied they were engaged in espionage operations.
Ministry officials could not explain how the two ended up in the North.
“We strongly demand North Korea to quickly release our citizens Kim Kuk-gi and Choe Chun-gil and repatriate them without hesitation,” ministry spokesman Lim Byeong-cheol told reporters in Seoul.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the country’s main spy agency, denied North Korea’s accusations of spying.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim was detained in September last year in Pyongyang and Choe near the border with China in December last year.
According to KCNA, Kim said on Thursday that he had gathered information about a railway station that late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had passed during his visit to China in 2009 and photos of its vicinity, and had spread comic books critical of the North’s leadership, while Choe said he had smuggled CDs and USB memory sticks containing sex films and South Korean movies into the North.
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