News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci
(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Escaped POW Says Men Alive

Date: October 12, 1998

This just picked up from broadcast...

VOA/Byline - John Larkin ... Dateline - Seoul

'A 72 year old South Korean has escaped from North Korea after 45 years as a Priosner of War. John Larkin reports from Seoul that the Priosner, Chang Mu Hwan, believes that at least 30 other southern veterans of the Korean War are still alive at heavily guarded towns in remote areas.'

Mr Chang is the third South Korean veteran to escape from North Korea since 1994. He arrived through China in August and at a debriefing last week with South Korea's Defense Ministry, he supplied the names of 30 men whom he said were fellow Prisoners of War and still alive.

The South Korean government believes Mr. Chang's evidence is credible and is cross checking it with existing records of soldiers Missing in Action.

Ministry officials say Mr. Chang told them he knew 70 South Korean soldiers who were incarcerated with him at a mining town in a northern province. Forty of them, he said, had died from ill treatment or old age.

The South Korean government says it will try to confirm that the thirty are still alive and then tryto repatriate them with the help of the United Nations (UN) and the International Red Cross (ICRC).

The south believes nearly thirty thousand of its soldiers were taken Prisoner during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, but that only 10% of them may still be slaive. The north has put the number of those captured far lower.

News reprots said his account was given extra weight because he had memorized the addresses of his fellow inamtes.