North Korea on Friday paraded a defector accused of involvement in a child abduction plot it says was masterminded by South Korean agents, as Seoul demanded the man’s immediate release.
In a carefully stage-managed press conference in Pyongyang, Ko Hyon-chol, 53, who fled the North in 2013 and was granted South Korean citizenship, “confessed” to trying to kidnap two orphans and take them to the South.
“I committed the unpardonable crime of being involved in attempted child abduction,” a weeping Ko said at the event in the People’s Palace of Culture in central Pyongyang.
Ko, wearing dark trousers and a blue striped shirt, was marched in by two uniformed soldiers and sat at a desk below framed photos of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il – North Korea’s revered late leaders.
In a 30-minute statement during which he frequently wept and referred to himself as a “traitor of the fatherland”, he detailed his defection, recruitment by the South’s spy agency and his “criminal acts”.