It was early evening in November of 2019 at Nampo’s roller skating rink, which was full of happy children and students.
As several children were having a grand time skating around, a black Ppeokkugi SUV slowly entered and stopped in an empty lot next to the roller rink. A man in his 50s and a woman in her 20s got out of the vehicle and switched seats. Now in the driver’s seat, the young woman haltingly began to practice driving.
A few minutes later, the car was taking a turn on the asphalt lot when it suddenly lunged forward, hitting square on a young student in roller skates who was approaching from the opposite direction.
Four or five children who witnessed the sudden accident screamed, while the man got out of the car, quickly moved the young woman over to the passenger seat, and seemingly checked whether the child the car hit was still alive. Then the car disappeared into the dusk.
Responders arrived only after a high school student at the scene used his mobile phone to call his parents. A full 30 minutes after the accident, the stricken student was brought to the hospital, where he ultimately died.
The victim was an 11 year old boy in the fifth grade. Police in Nampo sent neighborhood watch units a circular notice with a description of the hit-and-run suspects, and put everything they had into the investigation. This is because the boy’s parents were threatening to file petitions with the Ministry of Social Security in Pyongyang if local police could not find the culprits who killed their only child.
However, the police in Nampo failed to catch the hit-and-run suspects, and the incident became a cold case.
Fast forward about two years to October of 2021. A woman turned up before the Nampo police, telling them she wanted to turn herself in for the hit-and-run. Taking a direct part in the investigation, Nampo police immediately got the woman to testify in detail about what happened.
This is what the woman confessed:
I’m from Nampo, a cadre used to take care of me. I got to know him when we worked in the same team at a field in Pyongwon County where the Ministry of Social Security was mobilizing a rice planting campaign during the planting season when I was a freshman at the Pyongyang Kim Won Gyun Conservatory. The cadre made a sincere effort to help me because he knew there weren’t many students from the provinces in Pyongyang, and living at the competitive Kim Won Gyun Conservatory at that. He told me not to live in the university dormitory, helping me so I could buy an apartment near the campus that was allotted in another person’s name. And he helped my parents struggling in Nampo move from a one-floor house to an apartment. He used to say, ‘Since I’m helping you like a niece, follow me like an uncle. I’ll take care of you.’ Then one day, he said he’d teach me to drive and we left Pyongyang for Nampo, and that day I caused the accident.
Returning to Pyongyang immediately after the accident, the cadre implored the young woman to remain silent about the accident, and used his connections to scrap the vehicle’s old license plate and get a new plate for the car. With the cadre returning to Pyongyang right away and being meticulous enough to change the car’s plates, the pair proved difficult to arrest.
Above all, the woman said a few months after the accident, she learned she was pregnant with the cadre’s child, and that he forced her to get an abortion.
While she was suffering lingering aftereffects from the abortion, the cadre informed her that the state had ordered him overseas, and that he did not know when he would contact her again. Then she decided to confess about the hit-and-run accident, which she not only felt guilty about, but was also the vulnerability of the cadre who had abandoned her.
In particular, the woman said she came to the police in Nampo, her hometown and the department investigating the case, because the cadre had friends in high places in Pyongyang, where he wielded great power.
In the end, two years after the accident took place, the Ministry of Social Security cadre was sacked, discharged and sentenced to 15 years of forced labor for wilfully negligent homicide. The woman who turned herself in got a year of forced labor. The state confiscated the apartment the cadre illegally obtained for her in Pyongyang and her home in Nampo, too.
The police in Nampo closed the case and told the victim’s parents the full story. Upon hearing this, the parents said, “Having used his party-appointed position to readily turn a beautiful young university girl into his concubine and engage in dangerous behavior, the cadre killed another family’s precious only son.
“Is our nation, so full of unethical behavior on the part of cadres, really socialist?” they exclaimed.
The police in Nampo pledged to prevent a recurrence of such accidents. However, that pledge is nothing more than an empty prayer as long as authorities fail to fundamentally root out vices that have continued for decades in North Korea’s corruption-rife society.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
