North Korea presented South Korea with a hotel bill for almost 16,000 dollars after detaining and interrogating one of its citizens in an inn for 137 days, an official said Wednesday. Hyundai paid the 15,747 dollar bill for its employee when he was released this month from detention in the North's border city of Kaesong, a spokesman for the South Korean group said.
"North Korea released the worker after our company paid hotel expenses," he told AFP. Yu Seong-Jin, a 44-year-old engineer, returned home on August 13 after being detained for insulting the North's political system and for urging a local worker at the Kaesong joint industrial estate to defect. He works for Hyundai Asan, which operates the group's business ventures with the North.
Yu was not beaten or tortured and was given adequate food and sleep, the South's unification ministry said Tuesday in a report. But he underwent day-long interrogations every day for three months, was verbally threatened and forced sometimes to kneel on the floor, it said. Yu was not allowed contact with anyone apart from his interrogators. The ministry acknowledged Yu committed the offences for which he had been held. But it said interrogators had coerced him into making a false admission that he once worked for the South's spy agency.
Hyundai chairwoman Hyun Jung-Eun negotiated Yu's release and also met leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang amid thawing cross-border ties. It is not the first time the cash-strapped communist state has charged "hotel costs" for detainees.
In 1996 it demanded 100,000 dollars in penalties and other charges for the release of an American who had swum across a border river, apparently while drunk. Then-Congressman Bill Richardson, who negotiated the release of Evan Hunziker, said they finally settled for 5,000 dollars in "hotel costs."
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