News-Info-Alerts

Re: POWs in Pyongyang in 1993

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: August 22, 2003

"POWs in Pyongyang

By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

    POWs in Pyongyang

    We have obtained a Defense Intelligence Agency report that states four American prisoners of war from the Korean War were sighted in North Korea in 1993.

    A North Korean defector reported seeing the four POWs at the Changkwangsan Hotel coffee shop in Pyongyang in August or September of 1993.

    The POWs were described as being in their 50s or 60s and were under the control of the North Korean military's reconnaissance bureau. They were in the North Korean capital to give a lecture on American "armed power."

    The POWs were being transported in a Mercedes-Benz.

    The report, declassified at the request of the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIAs, also said that as of 1990 at least 10 U.S. prisoners, including "an unknown number of black men," were being held by North Korea in the Sungho district of Pyongyang.

    Also, in 1986 two Americans were spotted in Pyongyang teaching "western customs, western lifestyle and English" at a North Korean Communist Party school.

    The defector stated that he estimates that as many 60 American POWs are in North Korea.

    The declassified DIA report comes after admissions by North Korea that its intelligence services kidnapped Japanese nationals and held them for decades.

    Japan's government wants the issue of its abducted nationals to be raised during the six-party talks with North Korea on its nuclear program. American POW activists want the issue of missing American soldiers in North Korea raised at the Beijing talks as well, we are told. "