When I met Mr Kim in the outskirts of Seoul last month, he was accompanied by a plain clothes police officer - a typical safety measure for recent defectors.
Amnesty International’s North Korea specialist, Choi Jae-hoon, said he had heard of cases of starvation, from escapees in Seoul who had managed to speak to family back home.
Like most people in North Korea before Covid, he made his money selling items on the black market - in his case motorbikes and televisions smuggled from China.
Meanwhile Mr Kim started befriending the coastguards and security guards who patrolled the area, surreptitiously mining them for information about their movements, protocols and shift patterns, until he was confident he and his brother could take the boat out at night, without getting caught.
The coastline had been recently planted with landmines to prevent people leaving, Mr Kim said, but with fewer guards on duty there, it offered the safest way out.
South Korea’s government has made North Korean human rights one of its top priorities, but its vice-unification minister Moon Seong-hyun said it had “limited tools to use”.
The original article contains 2,788 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When I met Mr Kim in the outskirts of Seoul last month, he was accompanied by a plain clothes police officer - a typical safety measure for recent defectors.
Amnesty International’s North Korea specialist, Choi Jae-hoon, said he had heard of cases of starvation, from escapees in Seoul who had managed to speak to family back home.
Like most people in North Korea before Covid, he made his money selling items on the black market - in his case motorbikes and televisions smuggled from China.
Meanwhile Mr Kim started befriending the coastguards and security guards who patrolled the area, surreptitiously mining them for information about their movements, protocols and shift patterns, until he was confident he and his brother could take the boat out at night, without getting caught.
The coastline had been recently planted with landmines to prevent people leaving, Mr Kim said, but with fewer guards on duty there, it offered the safest way out.
South Korea’s government has made North Korean human rights one of its top priorities, but its vice-unification minister Moon Seong-hyun said it had “limited tools to use”.
The original article contains 2,788 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!