The tension between the United States and North Korea continues to escalate, and a defector has revealed a diabolical plan of Kim Jong Un. He wants to kidnap foreigners like diplomats, tourists and businessmen from South Korea and his intention is to checkmate the efforts of the United States to rein it in.
Kidnapping is not new to North Korea
According to Fox News, the defector has confirmed that North Korea has been involved in the kidnapping people for a long time and for different reasons. At times, they have gone to the extent of killing the kidnap victims, and the modus operandi is to target foreigners from South Korea, bringing them to the North and ultimately kill them.
During the reign of Kim Jong Il, several kidnappings were reported during the 1970s and the 1980s. The victims were an assorted lot and involved a 13-year-old girl who was on her way back from badminton, a cook, a recently engaged couple who were enjoying dinner by the beach and a club hostess. The leader justified the actions and blamed it on his special forces who were in their quest for glory.
Then there was a South Korean film couple, a movie-star wife, and director husband, who were kidnapped in 1977 from Hong Kong and taken to North Korea to help build the film industry. They remained captive for eight years before they escaped to recount their story.
American kidnap victims
Right now there is a student of the United States who is serving a 15-year-jail sentence of hard labor.
He was on a conducted tour to the country in 2016 and had, reportedly, stolen a propaganda poster from his hotel in Pyongyang. He is still a prisoner, and his whereabouts are unknown.
Then there is a 63-year-old man convicted of espionage. He is a South Korean-born naturalized U.S. citizen and is also serving a 15-year jail sentence for spying in North Korea.
A third case is that of a Korean-American pastor who was held in North Korea for 19 months on charges of evangelizing. He was released in 2014, because of the intervention of a former NBA star who exerted his influence to get the release. The player was a friend of Kim Jong Un.
It is easy to kidnap someone, especially if he is new to a country and kidnapping is a weapon of the weak.
It is wide as a lever to extract some sort of payment in cash or kind to free the kidnapped persons. Smugglers use it to squeeze money out of those in power and, in the day-to-day life, it is used to collect ransom to release the kidnapped person. However, in the political arena, leaders employ it as an arm-twisting measure to get things done.
