Seoul, March 11 – Ham Jin-woo, a North Korean defector turned journalist who went missing in 2017 in the border areas between North Korea and China, has been officially recognized by the government as one of seven South Koreans being held in North Korea, officials said on Wednesday.
The Unification Ministry has added Ham to the list of South Koreans being held captive in North Korea after consulting with relevant government agencies, according to a ministry official.
North Korea has detained seven South Koreans – three missionaries of Kim Jung-wook, Kim Kook-kie, and Choi Chun-gil, as well as four North Korean defectors who obtained South Korean nationality, according to the Unification Ministry's website. The names of the four defectors were not disclosed on the webpage.
Ham is believed to have been arrested by North Korean authorities while covering North-China border areas in May 2017 as a journalist for a North Korea-focused media outlet.
At a press conference last December, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young announced a plan to add Ham to the list of South Korean detainees in North Korea.
Kim Jung-wook and the other two missionaries have been detained in North Korea since 2014 on charges of anti-state activities for what Pyongyang called spying for Seoul's intelligence agency. The whereabouts of the three other North Korean defectors are unknown since they were held captive in 2016, Yonhap news agency reported.
Ham Jin Woo, a reporter, was abducted on May 29, 2017, while he was reporting on the Chinese side of the China-North Korea border between Sanhe and Longjin in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China and Hoiryong City, North Korea, according to a report submitted to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances by Eunkyong Kwon, Ham’s former colleague and secretary general of the North Korea-focused human rights group ICNK.
According to the report, Ham’s family had said that his Korean-Chinese taxi driver witnessed an argument and physical confrontation between Ham and two men who had crossed into China from North Korea, who then dragged the journalist over the border to North Korea.