Shin dong hyuk father knows best
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North Korea camp survivor Shin Dong-hyuk changes story
A North Korean prison camp escapee, who is now a high-profile human rights campaigner, has apologised for inaccuracies in his story.
Shin Dong-hyuk, 32, was the subject of a best-selling book after he fled North Korea in
The book described how Mr Shin was tortured, and his relatives killed.
On Saturday, the author said that although the key elements of Mr Shin's accounts were correct, the time and date of some events were wrong.
"From a human rights perspective, he was still brutally tortured, but he moved things around," Blaine Harden, the author, told the Washington brev, external.
Mr Shin was born inre a North Korean labour camp. He said that he spent 23 years in captivity before his escape, and that during his time inside, he was starved, tortured and saw his mother and brother executed.
He managed to flee after climbing through an electric fence, and eventually settled in South Korea.
Mr Harden
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My North Korean name is Shin In-kun (South Korean name: Shin Dong-hyuk). I was born on 19 November I was a political prisoner at birth in North Korea.
According to what I know from my father, Shin Kyong-sop, he was born in in the village of Yongjung-ni in Mundok District, South Pyongan Province, near Pyongyang, North Korea. He was the 11th of 12 brothers. It was in , when he was only 19 years old, that great tragedy struck his family.
One night, before dawn, policemen rushed into his house, carried away all the furniture, and loaded the entire family onto a truck. It took all day before they arrived at the camp No. 14, operated by the State Security Agency (SSA).
From the moment they arrived there, they were all separated and treated as beasts. With a few rare exceptions of meeting his younger brother in the same prison block, my father knew nothing about his brothers after this. My father was appointed to work in the mechanics&#; un
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Human rights defender's story: Shin Dong-hyuk from North Korea
‘People in a political prison camp lead a life less than the animals. They are treated worse than the dogs raised in the camp. What I wish to tell them is that despite the inhumane life conditions, they have to survive, so that they can see for themselves what kind of outside world we have and the people who live in it.&#;
Shin Dong-Hyuk was born and spent the first 23 years of his life in prison Camp 14 in North Korea. In the camp he was ill-treated, dehumanised and made to witness the public execution of his mother and brother. Not only did he not enjoy freedom, he says, but he had no idea what freedom meant.
Courageously, Shin escaped from the camp in and remains the only known person to have done so. He has since dedicated his life to raising awareness of the conditions in the camps and struggling for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of his fellow North Koreans. As he said, he understands how awful th