A NORTH Korean scientist who defected to Finland has promised to expose the regime’s shocking practice of testing chemical weapons in its own citizens.
The biochemical weapons scientist, 47, managed to flee a North Korean research centre on the Chinese border on June 6 via the Philippines, a source from a North Korean human rights group told Yonhap news agency.
He reportedly took with him a storage device loaded with 15 gigabytes of information on the use of humans to test biological and chemical weapons in the North Korean laboratory he worked in. The data would shed light on the regime’s “inhumane tests”, the source told Yonhap.
“His ostensible reason for defection is that he felt sceptical about his research,” the source said.
The defector, known only by his surname Lee, is now expected to give testimony before the European Union parliament later this month.
And his claims sounded credible, director of the US-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Greg Scarlatoiu, told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
“We have been told similar stories in the past that human experiments are carried out in prison camps,” he said.
Scarlatoiu also said it was likely the data would include evidence that North Korea had been testing chemical weapons on human prisoners.
The United Nations has already condemned systematic human rights violations under North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s communist regime.
Mr Lee’s testimony before the European parliament will be closely watched, Daniel Pinkston, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in South Korea, told The Telegraph.
“The international community will have to collect the data and, if it can be verified that such experiments have taken place, then that would seem to violate international humanitarian law,” he said.
“After that, it is up to the international community to do everything in its power to prevent this happening again, to terminate these programs and to hold those responsible for carrying them out accountable for their actions.”
Mr Lee’s claims have emerged months after a North Korean prisoner described being forced to eat frogs and insects while in prison, and undergoing a painful abortion without anaesthetic.
LIFTING THE LID ON HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
Mr Lee isn’t the first defector from North Korea to make claims about the secretive regime’s practice of testing chemicals on unwilling human subjects.
Im Cheon-yong, an officer in North Korea’s special forces who defected to South Korea in the mid-1990s, told The Telegraphlast year he witnessed chemical weapons tests being carried out on children with mental and physical disabilities during his training.
“For the biological and chemical warfare tests, we needed ‘objects’,” he explained.
“At first, they used the chemical agents on mice and showed us how they died. Then we watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Mr Im said tests were conducted in at least three facilities operated by the military.
Kwon Hyuk, a former head of security at North Korea’s infamous Camp 22, has described gas chambers where chemical experiments were conducted on prisoners.
Appearing on the BBC2 program This World in 2004, Hyuk said healthy prisoners were held inside glass chambers that were filled with gas while technicians observed their agonising deaths.
“I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,” he said in the documentary.
“The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but (until) the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.
“At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault, that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.”
His claims have been backed up by Lee Soon-ok, a former political prisoner who testified about the regime’s human rights violations at a US Senate committee in 2002.
She told the committee she once saw in the political prison “many prisoners lying on the slope of a hill, bleeding from their mouths and motionless, enveloped by strange fumes and surrounded by scores of guards in the gas masks”.
She has also publicly described another day, two years earlier, when she was forced to select 50 healthy female prisoners and give them a basket of soaked cabbages.
“I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood,” she said, as reported by the ABC.
“All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.”
Another defector has told of a government program where disabled people were reportedly sent for medical experiments such as “dissection of body parts”, according to the Daily Mail.
North Korea can manufacture 4500 tons of chemical agents a year, but has the capacity to ramp that up to 12,000 tons a year in the event of war, according to a report by 38 North, a respected website operated by the US-Korea Institute Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.
The regime reportedly produces hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, sarin, tabun, chlorine and a numerous mustard gases.
The report also said North Korea has provided chemical weapons or technology to Egypt, Iran, Libya and Syria since the 1990s.
Pyongyang denies having any chemical weapons and is one of five countries to not have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. It also denies the existence of its political camps.
But in February South Korean intelligence warned that Pyongyang has stepped up its biological and chemical warfare drills, carrying out at least a dozen large-scale exercises in the previous year.
“These are clearly offensive drills planning a biochemical attack,” a South Korean officer told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, as quoted in The Telegraph. “We believe it could cause a real threat.”