A BBC program says North Korea is killing political prisoners in experimental gas chambers and testing new chemical weapons on women and children.
Titled Access to Evil and scheduled to be aired yesterday, the program features an official North Korean document that says political prisoners are used to test new chemical weapons.
In a statement, the BBC said the documentary included comments by Kwon Hyuk, a new name given to a former military attache at the North Korean embassy in Beijing and chief of management at Prison Camp 22.
Using a drawing, he describes a gas chamber and the victims he says he saw at the prison in the northeast of the secretive communist state, near the Russian border.
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing," he said.
"Normally, a family sticks together [in the gas chamber] ... and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass."
Asked how he felt about the children, he said: "It would be a total lie for me to say I felt sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."
North Korean officials in London were unavailable to comment. BBC journalist Olenka Frenkiel said she had three independent confirmations that Kwon Hyuk was genuine.
The human rights group Amnesty International said it had been unable to confirm previous reports of such testing.
"We have heard of these allegations but we cannot confirm them," a spokeswoman said.
North Korea -- described by US President George W. Bush as part of an "axis of evil" because of a nuclear weapons program and an authoritarian system -- has denied accusations of human rights abuses.
A top-secret North Korean document also says political prisoners are used for "human biological experimentation and for production of biological weapons," the BBC said.
It interviews a person said to be a former prisoner in North Korea who had been ordered to poison others.
"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners. One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women," Sun Ok-lee said, according to the BBC statement.
"All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were quite dead," Sun said.
Frenkiel said she had also seen other official North Korean documents, one of which referred to the transfer of a prisoner "for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons."
A Chinese aircraft carrier group entered Japan’s economic waters over the weekend, before exiting to conduct drills involving fighter jets, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said yesterday. The Liaoning aircraft carrier, two missile destroyers and one fast combat supply ship sailed about 300km southwest of Japan’s easternmost island of Minamitori on Saturday, a ministry statement said. It was the first time a Chinese aircraft carrier had entered that part of Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), a ministry spokesman said. “We think the Chinese military is trying to improve its operational capability and ability to conduct operations in distant areas,” the spokesman said. China’s growing
Nine retired generals from Taiwan, Japan and the US have been invited to participate in a tabletop exercise hosted by the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science Foundation tomorrow and Wednesday that simulates a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2030, the foundation said yesterday. The five retired Taiwanese generals would include retired admiral Lee Hsi-min (李喜明), joined by retired US Navy admiral Michael Mullen and former chief of staff of the Japan Self-Defense Forces general Shigeru Iwasaki, it said. The simulation aims to offer strategic insights into regional security and peace in the Taiwan Strait, it added. Foundation chair Huang Huang-hsiung
PUBLIC WARNING: The two students had been tricked into going to Hong Kong for a ‘high-paying’ job, which sent them to a scam center in Cambodia Police warned the public not to trust job advertisements touting high pay abroad following the return of two college students over the weekend who had been trafficked and forced to work at a cyberscam center in Cambodia. The two victims, surnamed Lee (李), 18, and Lin (林), 19, were interviewed by police after landing in Taiwan on Saturday. Taichung’s Chingshui Police Precinct said in a statement yesterday that the two students are good friends, and Lin had suspended her studies after seeing the ad promising good pay to work in Hong Kong. Lee’s grandfather on Thursday reported to police that Lee had sent
BUILDUP: US General Dan Caine said Chinese military maneuvers are not routine exercises, but instead are ‘rehearsals for a forced unification’ with Taiwan China poses an increasingly aggressive threat to the US and deterring Beijing is the Pentagon’s top regional priority amid its rapid military buildup and invasion drills near Taiwan, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. “Our pacing threat is communist China,” Hegseth told the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense during an oversight hearing with US General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific as part of its broader strategy to dominate that region and then the world,” Hegseth said, adding that if it succeeds, it could derail
RSS