Global Security Newswire

North Korea has tested chemical weapons on human subjects, according to a defector who is the highest ranking North Korean scientist to have made such charges, the Los Angeles Times reported today (see GSN, Dec. 15, 2003).

The chemist, who defected to Seoul two years ago, said he witnessed a deadly chemical experiment on two political prisoners in 1979 and heard about others until the mid-1990s. His statements mark the first time a senior North Korean scientist has made allegations about human experimentation by Pyongyang, according to the Times.

“It is not easy for me to speak about this because I am a criminal myself,” the scientist said in an interview arranged by a U.S. human rights group.

He described the 1979 experiment, in which two men were tested separately in a gas chamber. He said it took three hours for each man to die.

“It was horrible. They were screaming and yelling,” said the chemist, who watched with other researchers from behind a large glass window. “I kept trying to look away. I knew how toxic the chemicals were in even small doses,” said the man, who asked that his name not be published for fear of retribution against family members still in North Korea.

North Korea last month denied gassing prisoners, and it is impossible to confirm the scientist’s account, the Times said, but several human rights activists found the man’s story credible.

“What he saw happened a long time ago, but he is a very senior scientist, and he is the first to describe human experimentation,” said Seoul-based human rights investigator Kim Sang Hun (Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, March 3).

In its annual human rights report released last week, the U.S. State Department reported that 150,000 to 200,000 North Koreans were held in prison camps where “conditions are extremely harsh and prisoners are not expected to live” (U.S. State Department release, Feb. 25).