It has been reported that the teenage daughter of an elite member of the North Korean security services recently defected while studying at a foreign language university in Beijing, and is now under investigation in South Korea.
Kim Yong Hwa, who heads a Seoul-based NGO dedicated to helping refugees, confirmed the news yesterday, saying that the organization had been approached directly to assist in the defection process, and had helped the 18-year old girl to leave China.
The girl, known only as “Miss Han,” then travelled to South Korea via Southeast Asia with the assistance of the South Korean authorities.
Few details of the girl have been made public, but according to Kim, her father is a top public security official in the North Korean capital, making him the equivalent of a metropolitan chief of police.
Kim has been reported as noting that the young girl’s defection became known earlier this year, and may have contributed to North Korea’s specific insistence that a group of nine teenage defectors be returned to the country by the Laotian authorities at the end of May.
Elite-level defections from Pyongyang are exceedingly rare, meaning that defectors from Pyongyang constitute a very small percentage of the total defector population in the South.
The South Korean authorities have not confirmed the defection.
