BEIJING/WASHINGTON, 7 September 2003 — A North Korean biological weapons expert has been detained while trying to slip into the Australian Consulate in China’s southern city of Guangzhou to seek political asylum, an anti-Pyongyang activist said yesterday.
Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor-turned-activist, said plainclothes security agents had detained Ri Chae Woo, who planned to testify in the United States against Pyongyang’s chemical and biological weapons program. Vollertsen, quoted on a human rights website, said Ri had evidence of human experiments in North Korea.
While North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has been a top international concern recently, the reclusive state is also believed to be capable of making large amounts of chemical weapons such as nerve, blister and choking agents.
Ri had worked for the Chiha-ri Chemical Corp in Anbyon, south of Wonsan, North Korea, until June 2003 when he and his wife and two teenage children fled to China, Vollertsen said. “He (Ri) was disguised in the uniform of maintenance staff of the building which houses the consulate,” Vollertsen said in a statement on the Chosun Journal website, which promotes human rights in North Korea.
“He was apprehended in the fire escape stairwell, his family members escaped via a nearby fast food restaurant and are at large,” Vollertsen said.
Guangzhou police declined to comment, and the Australian Consulate was not immediately available for comment.
Activists say up to 300,000 North Korean refugees are hiding in northeast China after slipping across the border to flee hunger, poverty and repression in their Communist homeland. Defectors say North Korean refugees who are sent home face imprisonment, torture or death.
China, which fought alongside the North during the 1950-53 Korean War, has an agreement with its neighbor to repatriate North Koreans, whom it views as economic migrants — not refugees.
But to avert Western criticism, China has allowed many North Korean asylum seekers to leave for South Korea via third countries.
Last year, more than 1,000 North Koreans reached South Korea via China and other countries. Since last year, China has allowed more than 150 asylum seekers, who have fled to foreign embassies and schools in China, to leave and ultimately reach South Korea.
Last month, Shanghai police foiled an attempt by nine North Korean refugees to sneak into a Japanese school and arrested a Japanese national for helping them. Three South Koreans were also detained for filming the refugees. In July, four North Korean teenagers slipped into the British consulate in Shanghai and were sent later to South Korea.
Meanwhile, the United States is looking at how it can give North Korea the security assurances it has demanded, as it prepares for a planned next round of talks in a nuclear crisis mediation effort, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday. Powell told reporters that the issue was the only price Pyongyang had so far formally asked of the US side.
“The only thing that North Korea has said to us that they would like to see from the United States is a security assurance that we are not planning to attack them or invade them,” Powell said after meeting Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez.
“We have said that and they wish to see this assurance provided in some form that they would have confidence in.
“That’s the stage of discussion and negotiation we are at now... we are looking at ways in which we can give them the kind of assurance that they say they need.” The US had refused to offer North Korea a formal non-agression treaty as a price for ending the crisis.
But Powell has in the past suggested that some form of US statement that it has no plans to attack or invade North Korea could be noted in some way by Congress, short of a formal treaty ratification.
Powell said Friday that it was too soon to discuss what kind of aid and financial assistance Pyongyang could expect from Washington if it decided to stand down its nuclear program.
“With respect to other things that might flow from that and how one goes about verifying the destruction of their nuclear weapons capability, all these issues are for discussion in the future.”