The BBC is carrying a report from South Korean organization Good Friends that 15 people were shot on a bridge in the border town of Onseong, North Korea, two weeks ago either for trying to flee into China or helping others to do so. It is reported that the refugees were seeking aid from relatives in China. A Yonhap version of the story, via Naver, can be accessed here.
Onseong, in the northernmost point in North Korea , used to host the #12 Concentration Camp until 1987, when a large-scale riot erupted after an angry prisoner beat to death a security agent for inflicting extreme torture. Out of 15,000 prisoners, 5,000 were killed. The rest were transferred to Yodok.
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Thanks for the post Sonagi,
That’s a shame, and they were brazen enough to it out in the open.
I’ve walked half away across the bridge at Domun/Onseong. Also if you walk a up a small hill a little further up from the railway bridge you can see right into that town.
Kids playing in the school, guards patrolloing the Domun/Tumen river, pictures of Kim Il-sung at the train station, farmers working the fields.
I wonder if there were many witnesses on the Chinese side of the border? - not that would be able to do anything about it.
Onseong is not across from Domun/Tumen. The city you were looking at is Namyang. I visited the border town of Tumen, also, in the winter. Better views, but freezing cold outside! I don’t imagine they were too much warmer in the buildings across the river, as I didn’t see smoke coming out of many smokestacks.
My bad..I forgot the name of 남양…and thought it was Onseong when it said North Korea’s most Northernmost point of north Korea.. I get the city and 군 district names confused.
I thought it would quite strange to kill the people if it was at 남양, as it is very easy to see.
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[...] refugees, and shooting people who try to cross the border into China in search of food (see Sonagi’s post at TMH and the North Korea Monitor). That is a change. In the recent past, the regime had been [...]