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North Korea has conducted a brutal crackdown including public executions of human traffickers and cellphone owners in the Sino-Korean border town of Hoeryeong, North Hamgyeong Province, witnesses said. There are rumors that clandestine footage of the executions has been smuggled out of the country. Hoeryeong is one of the major defection routes out of North Korea and the site of a recently dismantled concentration camp.
A North Korean administrative official who recently defected to the South said there were three rounds of arrests aimed at ¡°anti-socialist groups¡± in the Hoeryeong area between January and February this year by squads made up of agents of the State Safety and Security Agency, the Ministry of Public Security and police.
The defector said the roundup targeting anti-socialist elements linked to China happened at the direct orders of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Three individuals were executed for human trafficking and trying to sell U.S. military dog tags on Feb. 28 and March 1.
The defector said a judge on Feb. 28 read the sentence aloud. ¡°In times made difficult by the vile anti-DPRK schemes of the U.S. and their South Korean puppets, anti-party counterrevolutionaries who damaged the authority of the party and Fatherland will be executed," he quoted the judge as saying. Nine women implicated in human trafficking were given prison sentences.
Other defectors said 63 households -- about 300 people -- were sent into forced exile in remote mountainous regions in South Hamgyeong Province such as Jangjin and Bujeon counties. One said that secretly filmed footage of the Feb. 28 executions was smuggled abroad.
Meanwhile, a North Korean official who visited China earlier this year said work on dismantling the notorious Political Prison Camp No. 22 was completed late last year. Work on dismantling the camp began in 2003. The official said the camp was taken down because a large-scale riot broke out there in October 2003 and because satellite photos of the camp had drawn the interest of the international community.
Lee Myeong-cheol (not his real name), a defector from Hoeryeong, said it seemed the political prisoners kept at the Heoryeong camp were moved to a prison in Yodeok. The Hoeryeong camp was North Korea¡¯s largest, with about 50,000 inmates. About rumors that the camp had been dismantled, a South Korean National Intelligence Service official said Thursday there was information along those lines, but it needed to be confirmed.
(Kang Cheol-hwan, nkch@chosun.com )
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