By Chung Min-uck
Four South Korean activists including a highprofile human rightist Kim Young-hwan, 49, arrived in Seoul on Friday after being detained by the Chinese authorities for more than 100 days.
The former detainees arrived at Incheon International Airport around 7:28 p.m. escorted by Korean officials, returning from Shenyang on a Korean Air flight.
Kim and his colleagues will return home after going through a debriefing. They were in good health.
They were arrested on March 29 in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian on charges of endangering state security and have been held in a detention center in Dandong near the border with North Korea since then.
“The Chinese government extradited Kim and his colleagues to our government around 5:15 p.m.
today,” said a foreign ministry official, Friday.
According to the official, the Chinese government unilaterally reported the decision to extradite them in the form of deportation without stating any specific reason on Thursday.
Kim was originally a follower of North Korea’s philosophy of “juche (self-reliance),” and met with the regime’s founder Kim Il-sung in 1991. He, however, later renounced the ideology and became an activist highlighting the North’s poor human rights conditions.
He is now a senior researcher at the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, a Seoul-based civic group for North Korean defectors.
Chinese Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu made a visit to Korea last week allegedly to discuss the release of the detainees.
Meng sat down with many high-profile government officials including Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan and National Intelligence Service Director Won Sei-hoon.
Details on the arrests are still unknown but insiders here believe the case was apparently linked to the Koreans’ efforts to help North Korean defectors in China.
Critics say Beijing could have requested Seoul to remain silent on their activities in China in exchange for the release. China reportedly banned entry of the South Korean activists.
The fate of the activists drew public attention here since the case was revealed amid criticism on China which has been repatriating North Korean defectors calling them “illegal economic immigrants” under a decades-long pact with its main ally.
Many human rights activists are known to be helping North Korean defectors trying to escape to the South at China’s northeastern region that borders with North Korea.
Repatriated North Koreans reportedly receive harsh punishment from the Stalinist regime including torture and imprisonment.
Seoul has long been working to secure the release of the four activists but only twice had consular access to Kim until the release.