Defector questioning underway

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Defector questioning underway

Twenty-one North Korean defectors, including nine children, who fled their famine-stricken homeland in a small fishing boat had been planning their exodus since June, officials in Seoul said Monday after an initial debriefing of the group. The northerners, reportedly comprising three families, arrived at the port of Incheon on Monday morning after their boat was towed to port by maritime police.

According to officials at Incheon, 12 adults and nine children aboard a 20-ton wooden boat were spotted in waters 17 miles south of Deokjeok Island off the west coast at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday by a South Korean patrol boat. The North Koreans signaled their intent to defect immediately and the boat was towed to the military port area, arriving early Monday morning.

"The defectors began drawing up their plan to escape from the North after Sun Yong-beom was named the captain of the ship," the National Maritime Police Agency told the press Monday. "Mr. Sun used to work at the fisheries base in Seoncheon-gun and he became in charge of the wooden ship, named the Daedu 8003, in June." Seoncheon county is about 50 kilometers southwest of the North Korea-China border on the Yellow Sea.

According to the maritime police, Mr. Sun planned his escape after seeing the prosperity of the South on a Chinese-built black-and-white television set installed in the boat. "Mr. Sun and his 16 family members, Bang Gi-bok and his two family members and Lee Gyeong-seon, the engineer on the boat, joined the plan," the maritime police said.

Mr. Sun's father was born in Nonsan, South Chungcheong province in South Korea, the police said. "Mr. Sun believed that his cousins were probably alive in the South, and the hard living in the North also encouraged them to defect," the police told reporters.

Sun Jong-seok, 70, the captain's father and the eldest member of the group, reportedly met his brother, Sun Bong-sik, who lives in Daejeon, South Korea, in December 2000. The private reunion took place in China. "In the questioning session, he said his plan to escape North Korea dated back 10 years," another government official said. Born in South Korea, the elder Mr. Sun's determination to escape increased after the clandestine meeting, although he apparently did not want to risk taking the land route through China with all its uncertainties.

Another government official said the fishing boat used by the North Koreans was an unusual one. "The boat is not a North Korean-made vessel; it is a Chinese fishing boat that North Korea confiscated after a fisheries violation," the official said. "Thus, the boat was equipped with a global positioning system.

"Mr. Sun obtained a fishing operations permit and hid the people under the deck beforehand," the official said. "They set sail on Saturday dawn's high tide."

The fishing boat, originally meant for a crew of four to five people, headed for international waters and then swung around to the southeast.

The group plowed through rains and strong winds at night at its full speed of 11 knots. They cleared North Korean territorial waters after about two hours; at that point, they disguised their ship as a Chinese fishing boat and continued onward.

"After entering international waters, our boat ran across Chinese boats several times, but we carefully maintained our distance from them," Mr. Sun reportedly told interrogators here.

The boat crossed into South Korean waters at about 4 a.m. Sunday, 24 hours after it began the dramatic journey. "The defectors sailed 270 miles from North Korea to Incheon on an optimized route in the minimum number of hours required," the maritime police said, taking into account the necessity to minimize their presence in North Korea's territorial sea. Their trip would have been impossible without the global positioning system, the police added.

According to the same government official who spoke about the initial debriefing, North Korea's monitoring of fishing boats has loosened in recent months, and fishing boats have been operating without the government's control.

These "boat people" comprise the largest number such arrivals. The last such incident was in 1997 when a group of 14 defectors crossed the Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea; the first such sea escape took place in February 1987.

by Oh Young-hwan

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