Human rights activists demanded yesterday that either China or North Korea release a chemical engineer arrested while trying to defect to South Korea to testify about gas chamber experiments on political prisoners in the Stalinist North.
The North Korean engineer was arrested in China but it was unclear whether he was being held there or had already been returned to North Korea, the activists said.
Kang Byong Sop, identified as a 59-year-old engineer at North Korea's Feb. 8 Vinalon Complex, and his wife and a son were arrested by Chinese authorities on the Laotian border on Jan. 3, the activists told a news conference in Seoul.
Before fleeing North Korea, Kang managed to steal three "top secret" documents on gas chamber experiments conducted at his chemical plant in North Korea's central east coast town of Hamhung and deliver them through middlemen to South Korean rights activists, they said.
Do Hee-yoon, secretary general of the Seoul-based Civil Coalition for Human Rights of the Kidnapped and Defectors from North Korea, described Kang as on a "mission" to follow the documents out and testify in person about the gassings, when his family was intercepted by Chinese authorities.
"We don't know what happened to the family," Do said. "We fear they may have already been repatriated to North Korea. We urge the North Korean regime to return them to the international community."
In separate news conferences in London and Seoul, the activists released the documents, purported "letters of transfer" recording that three inmates of the No. 22 Control Center, a widely reported prison camp in the North's northeastern tip, were transported to the No. 2 Daily Goods Plant at the chemicals complex.
In the documents dated Feb. 13, 2003, a prison camp official recorded in a hand-writing entry that the three inmates were transferred as "subjects for necessary human experiments for liquid gas chemical weapons."
There was no way to confirm the authenticity of the crumpled documents. US officials acknowledge widespread human rights abuse in North Korea, the world's most isolated totalitarian state, but critics often suspect rights activists of exaggerating allegations against the communist regime.
The gas chamber allegations "still need to be verified," said South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun yesterday. He cautioned that some North Korean defectors cause "sensation" by testifying to things they had not witnessed themselves.
Activists defended the documents as genuine, and challenged the North Korean regime to account for the fates and whereabouts of the three inmates, identified in the documents as Kim Byong Hak, 51; Nam Chun Hyok, 29; and Choe Mun Pyo, 43.
Another son of the North Korean engineer, Kang Seong Kuk, defected to South Korea in 2001 and has been working with activists to bring his father and family to the South.
The Feb. 8 complex is well-known among North Koreans.
Lee Jae-gun, a kidnapped South Korean fisherman who fled to the South in 2000 after 30 years in the North, said he lived in a town not far from the complex.
In 1985, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung visited the area and ordered the factory to help exterminate a rat infestation at a nearby chicken farm.
"In two months, the scientists came out with a rat poison that killed only rats and not the chickens," Lee said. "People took out truckloads of dead rats. They made some weird stuff in that plant."
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