North-Korea's dirty secrets

North Korea�s dirty secrets: Are US POWs among those still held by Pyongyang?

NEW YORK, Dec. 14, 1998 (MSNBC)�Forty-five years after declaring them dead, South Korea on Monday announced that two former soldiers captured during the Korean War have escaped from a slave labor camp in the Communist North.

Later the same day, US defense officials announced an agreement with North Korea to create a "joint investigating team" to clear up the fate of over 8,100 US servicemen still listed as missing from the 1950-53 war. What is wrong with this picture?

THE TWO ESCAPEES
67-year-old Kim Bok-ki, 67, and 71-year-old Park Dong-il, are the [fourth and] fifth South Korean soldiers to make their way back from captivity in the North since the end of the war.

South Korea�s intelligence agency, the Agency for National Security Planning, said Monday it was debriefing the men, who arrived in the south reportedly from China along with two of their children. The official version says they escaped after more than four decades of slave labor in a North Korean mine.

South Korea�s intelligence agency is not above staging such an event to blacken the name of its bitter rivals in the North. Yet US officials on Monday said they escapees appear to be genuine. And that raises some troubling questions.

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