On Sunday, North Korea’s state-controlled media announced the detention of another American for “hostile acts” against the state.
“A relevant institution of the DPRK detained American citizen Kim Hak Song on May 6 under a law of the DPRK on suspension of his hostile acts against it,” read the North Korean announcement, as transcribed by Reuters.
This is very similar to the rationale deployed for detaining Kim Sang Dok, who worked for the same school, in April.
The school in question is the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), which was founded in 2010. “The volunteer faculty of PUST, many of whom are evangelical Christians, has a curriculum that includes subjects once considered taboo in North Korea, such as capitalism,” Reuters reports.
Kim Sang Dok was in charge of the experimental farm at the PUST college of agriculture. The new detainee, Kim Hak Song, has described himself as a Christian missionary who wanted to help the Korean people become more self-sufficient by helping them develop advanced agricultural techniques.
The KCNA report on his detention said he was “doing business in relation to the operation of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.” According to CNN, the university has confirmed he was performing “agricultural development work with the university’s agricultural farm.”
Classmates from the United States told CNN that Kim Hak Song is an ethnic Korean who was born in China and emigrated to the United States in the 1990s. He became a U.S. citizen in the 2000s, then returned to China. He has family in both China and Korea.
“Professor Kim was a man who would call North Korea as his own country. He went to Pyongyang to devote himself to the development of North Korea’s agricultural technology so that the North can be self-sufficient with food,” said classmate David Kim.
He added that Kim Hak Song was willing to fund some of his research out of his own pocket and criticized the North Koreans for “persecuting their savior, a person who came to help them.”
The U.S. State Department said on Monday that it was aware of the reports about Kim Hak Song’s arrest, but could not comment further due to “privacy considerations.” The State Department said it would work with the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which handles American diplomatic interests with North Korea, to obtain more details.
Korea studies professor Stephan Haggard of the University of California San Diego described these two recent arrests as “classic asymmetric warfare,” to Time magazine, with North Korea “nabbing” American citizens in response to pressure against its nuclear and missile programs. He also suggested the arrest of another American could “reflect a panic on the part of the regime, that they’re under pressure and scrambling.”
In addition to Kim Sang Dok and Kim Hak Song, the BBC notes North Korea is holding two other American citizens: 62-year-old Kim Dong Chul, who was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for espionage, and 22-year-old Otto Warmbier, who was given 15 years of hard labor for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda sign from a hotel.