North Korea says a Canadian pastor detained since January had admitted to planning “subversive plots” but his supporters said he was only doing humanitarian work.
Reverend Hyeon Soo-lim, of the Light Korean Presbyterian church in Toronto, was detained by North Korean authorities in January just after he arrived from China, according to Canadian consular officials.
Pyongyang’s KCNA news agency, using its usual pugnacious rhetoric, said on Thursday Lim had admitted in a public interrogation to carrying out “subversive plots and activities in a sinister bid to build a religious state in the DPRK”.
The regime has previously held staged public confessions in similar cases where prisoners are effectively forced to read from a prepared text.
“I have so far malignantly defamed the dignity and social system of the DPRK, pursuant to the scenario of the US and the South Korean regime,” Lim was quoted as telling officials, media and diplomats at the People’s Palace of Culture.
“I delivered a ‘report on what is going on in North Korea’ before tens of thousands of South Koreans and overseas Koreans at sermons on Sundays at my church and during preaching tours of more than 20 countries,” KCNA quoted him as saying.
Reverend Chun Ki-Won, the director of Durihana, a South Korean Christian missionary organisation helping North Korean refugees, said Lim was one of the most influential Christian missionaries operating in the North.
He had led numerous aid missions to North Korea involving work with orphanage houses, nursing homes and food plants, said Chun – missions the KCNA has now dismissed as a cover for his plan to damage the “dignity and social system of the DPRK”.
Pyongyang views foreign missionaries with deep suspicion and, while it allows some to undertake humanitarian work, anyone suspected of engaging in any unauthorised activities faces arrest.
A number of missionaries – mostly American citizens – have been arrested in North Korea in the past with some of them only allowed to return home after interventions by high-profile US figures.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
