Defector says North Korea tests germ warfare on disabled

Posted 2015-07-06 12:44 by Grunt Report

A North Korean scientist involved in the regime’s biological and chemical weapons programs has defected, apparently with evidence of tests on human subjects.

The researcher, who has only been identified by his surname, Lee, was based at a microbiology research centre in Ganggye, near the Chinese border, but defected on June 6, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

Mr Lee, 47, fled to Finland via the Philippines, according to a group that campaigns for human rights in North Korea.

He was carrying an electronic data storage device allegedly containing 15 gigabytes of information on Kim Jong-un’s regime’s use of humans to test biological and chemical weapons.

He plans to give testimony to the European Parliament this month to highlight the North’s abuse of its own people, the rights group said.

There have been similar reports in the past. Im Cheon-yong, an officer in North Korea’s special forces, defected in the mid-1990s, telling South Korean intelligence officials that the final straw was seeing mentally and physically disabled children being used in chemical weapons tests as part of his training.

“For the biological and chemical warfare tests, we needed ‘objects’,” he said in an interview last year. “At first, they used the chemical agents on mice and showed us how they died. Then we watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Mr Im said tests were conducted at three or more facilities operated by the military, including one alongside a political prison camp close to the city of Hyanghari. Anthrax was frequently tested, along with as many as 40 chemical weapons that the regime had concocted itself.

In February, South Korean intelligence warned that Pyongyang had stepped up biological and chemical warfare drills, carrying out at least a dozen large-scale exercises in the previous year.

A report issued last year by 38 North, a respected website operated by the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, suggested that North Korea devotes substantial resources to chemical weapons.

Based on testimony from soldiers who have defected, the study claimed the regime was able to manufacture 4500 tons of chemical agents a year, with capacity to ramp that up to 12,000 tons. The regime was producing hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, sarin, tabun, chlorine and a number of agents from the mustard gas family and had reportedly provided chemical weapons or technology to Egypt, Iran, Libya and Syria since the 1990s, it said.

Coming after United Nations investigations into North Korea’s human rights abuses, Mr Lee’s testimony will be closely watched.

“The international community will have to collect the data and, if it can be verified that such experiments have taken place, then that would seem to violate international humanitarian law,” said Daniel Pinkston, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Seoul.

“After that, it is up to the international community to do everything in its power to prevent this happening again, to terminate these programmes and to hold those responsible for carrying them out accountable,” he said.

North Korea is already the subject of UN sanctions and it is not clear what further steps might be taken.