A number of North Koreans trying to leave the country have fallen victim to traps set up by the North’s Ministry of State Security agents amid stronger surveillance aimed at securing its shared border with China, local sources report.
“Late last November, a family tried to defect with the help of a broker to meet a relative living in South Korea but they were arrested during the attempt. It turns out that the Ministry of State Security (MSS) coerced the broker into setting the family up to get caught,” a source in North Hamgyong Province reported.
“The relative in South Korea, a father, routinely sent money through a broker to his wife, who is in her 50s, back in North Korea. One day the broker approached the woman and told her that her husband wanted his family to join him in the South and he would ensure their safe passage. The MSS learned all the details in the course of the investigation.”
Such coercion by the MSS as a rent-seeking tactic is not a new development, with agents routinely using such tactics to line their own pockets and add notches to their arrest quota.
“The wife and her two children, both in their mid-20s, learned the truth when they were detained. The agents couldn’t have showed less remorse if they tried,” added a separate source in North Hamgyong Province who corroborated the report.
The manufactured defections are also likely a bid for MSS officers to deliver results following the dispatch of a joint inspection team to the Sino-North Korean border area to prevent border-crossings and defections late last year.
“A lot of people in Onsong County have been caught trying to defect this way. Usually they’ll look the other way for money. But in these cases, we’re just helpless victims they’re exploiting for cash,” the source lamented.
A defector who recently resettled in South Korea told Daily NK, “This induced set-up defection trick has been going on for a while. People become victims of it every year. A lot of it coincides with the strengthened border control and subsequent difficulty in defecting.”
