OF ALL Asia’s honeymoon venues, the bleak border between North Korea and China is the last place that most newlywed couples would choose.
It would seem especially true for Jin Kyung Sook and her husband, Moon Jung Hoon. Both are North Koreans who escaped the starvation and repression of their country to defect to South Korea.
Yet that is where they were when, according to Mr Moon, his wife was abducted by North Korean agents and taken back to the country from which she had recently escaped.
Yesterday, at a news conference in Seoul, the South Korean capital, Mr Moon wept as he spoke of his wife’s “honeymoon” abduction. “There were five people altogether and two of them grabbed my wife from behind,” Mr Moon said, describing the alleged abduction on August 8.
“They were carrying her away in what looked like a sack and she was screaming, and she called after me and she screamed again because maybe they were hitting her.”
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It was an unusually late honeymoon — the couple married eleven months ago — and he was asked why did they choose to visit a place so close to the country they had recently fled? “She wanted to see Mount Paektu so much, and that’s why we went to China for our honeymoon,” Mr Moon said. Mount Paektu is the sacred mountain of the Koreans on the border of China and North Korea.
The couple were trying to send gifts to Ms Jin’s cousin in North Korea through an intermediary on the other side of the river when they were assaulted by four men with knives who spoke with North Korean accents, Mr Moon said. The couple have a two-year-old son in the South.
The South Korean Government said that it was “seeking to confirm” the abduction. More than 5,000 North Korean refugees have arrived in the South in recent years, most since 2002. The latest arrivals — 468 people in all — arrived in the South on two aircraft from Vietnam last month.