Seoul, March 11 Ham Jin-woo, a North Korean defector-turned-journalist who went missing in 2017 in border areas between North Korea and China, has been officially recognised by the government as one of seven South Koreans detained in the North, officials said on Wednesday.
The unification ministry has newly added Ham to the list of South Koreans held captive in North Korea after consulting with relevant government agencies, according to a ministry official.
North Korea has detained seven South Koreans -- three missionaries of Kim Jung-wook, Kim Kook-kie and Choi Chun-gil, as well as four North Korean defectors who obtained South Korean nationality, according to the unification ministry's website. The names of the four defectors were not disclosed on the webpage.
Ham is believed to have been arrested by North Korean authorities while covering North-China border areas in May 2017 as a journalist of a North Korea-focused media outlet.
At a press conference in December last year, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young unveiled a plan to add Ham to the list of the South Korean detainees in the North.
Kim Jung-wook and the two other missionaries have been detained in North Korea since 2014 on anti-state charges for what Pyongyang called spying for Seoul's spy agency. The whereabouts of the three other North Korean defectors are not known since they were held captive in 2016, Yonhap news agency reported.
Ham Jin Woo, a reporter was abducted on May 29, 2017, while he was reporting on the Chinese side of the China-North Korea border between Sanhe, Longjin in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China and Hoiryong City, North Korea, according to a report submitted to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances by Eunkyong Kwon, Ham’s former colleague and secretary general of the North Korea-focused human rights group ICNK.
According to the report, Ham’s family had said that his Korean-Chinese taxi driver witnessed an argument and physical confrontation between Ham and two men who had crossed into China from North Korea who then dragged the journalist over the border to North Korea.
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