North Korea says it holds missionary

December 29, 2009|Associated Press

SEOUL - North Korea said today that it has detained an American who entered the country illegally. Activists have said the 28-year-old from Arizona went to the communist nation on a mission to call attention to the regime’s human rights abuses.

The American was being investigated after “illegally entering’’ the country at the North Korea-China border last Thursday, North Koreas’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a two-line dispatch.

The report did not identify the American, but activists believe he is Robert Park, a 28-year-old Christian missionary who they say slipped across the frozen Tumen River into North Korea from China on Christmas bearing letters calling for a change in North Korea’s leadership and an end to political prison camps.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry said it cannot confirm that the person cited in the dispatch is Park, but added that it had no intelligence indicating that other Americans went into North Korea illegally in recent days.

North Korea is one of the most reclusive nations in the world, allowing few citizens beyond its borders and strictly regulating who is allowed in.

The detention occurs just months after North Korea freed two US journalists who were arrested in March and sentenced four months later to 12 years of hard labor for trespassing and engaging in “hostile acts.’’ The women were released in August to former US president Bill Clinton, who journeyed to Pyongyang to negotiate their freedom.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters yesterday that the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang has offered to try to get information about Park for the United States.