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News & Reporting
The family of an American missionary kidnapped by North Korea found justice this week, with the help of a group of Israeli legal activists.
A federal district court in Washington, D.C., ordered the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to pay $330 million in damages to the family of Kim Dong Shik, a Presbyterian pastor kidnapped by agents 15 years ago.
He later died in a prison camp.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat Hadin, the Israeli group that represented Kim’s family, told the Jerusalem Post that the decision is a blow against “state sponsored terrorism.”
The family sued under the “terrorism exception” to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
“This is an important human rights decision that will be utilized in all political abduction cases going forward,” Darshan-Leitner told the Post.
The story of Kim’s abduction sounds like something out a Cold War spy novel.
Kim, a naturalized US citizen and father of seven, was kidnapped by North Korean spies while working with refugees in the Chinese border town of Yanji. At the time, he ran shelters and “The School of Love” for handicapped and refugee children whose families had escaped North Korea.
“The North Korean security service learned of Reverend Kim’s activities on behalf of the defectors and refugees and decided to kidnap him and bring him to North Korea to thwart his work on behalf of those who have escaped,” according to court documents.
A spy, codenamed “Lee Sun Hee,” befriended Kim and followed him around for 10 months. In January 2000, she invited Kim to dinner, offering to introduce him to some North Korean defectors.
Instead, according to court documents, Kim was attacked, forced into a cab, and spirited across the border into North Korea. He was never heard from again.
While in Korea, Kim was confined to a political penal-labor colony known as a “kwan-li-so,” according to court documents. There he was ...
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