North Korea detains two US journalists

Two Americans have been detained by North Korea for illegally crossing its border and are under investigation, the country’s official news agency said today.

The Korean Central News Agency said the two Americans were detained on March 17 “while illegally intruding into the territory of (North Korea) by crossing the (North Korea)-China border”.

KCNA said police were investigating the case. The brief dispatch gave no further details.

US State Department officials said Washington was in contact with North Korea about the two detained journalists.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “is engaged on this matter right now”, spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.

South Korean media and a missionary identified the two Americans as Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for former US vice president Al Gore’s San Francisco-based media outlet Current TV.

The two reporters were in the border area with a male cameraman and their guide as part of a reporting assignment on North Korean refugees.

The journalists headed to the Chinese city of Yanji, across the border from North Korea’s far north-eastern corner, where they planned to interview women forced by human traffickers to strip for online customers, according to the Rev Chun Ki-won of the Seoul-based Durihana Mission, a Christian group which helps defectors.

Chun said Ling and Lee contacted him three months ago asking for help organising a trip to China.

They also planned to meet children of defectors, Chun said. Many children who grow up on the run in China live in legal limbo, unable even to attend school, according to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report.

The journalists and cameraman Mitch Koss were following a guide across the frozen Tumen River early on Tuesday morning when North Korean soldiers armed with rifles approached them from a half-hidden guard post, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported today.

Koss and the guide pushed the North Korean soldiers away and ran back toward China, but Ling and Lee were caught, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified source.

Koss and the guide were later seized by Chinese border guards and sent to the Chinese Public Security Bureau, the newspaper said. Their whereabouts remain unclear.

The North Korean-Chinese border is long, porous and not well demarcated and thus a common route for escape from the North.

A growing number of North Koreans have fled into China to avoid political repression, chronic food shortages and to seek asylum, mostly in South Korea.