U.N. Probe Sought on Alleged Atrocities

A U.S.-based Jewish human rights group has urged the United Nations to investigate claims that North Korea conducted gas chamber experiments on political prisoners, comparing the alleged acts to those in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center made the appeal Tuesday after the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a TV documentary in which a man, claiming to be a former North Korean agent, described seeing prisoners gassed to death.

The claim could not be verified.

“This brings to mind the imagery of Nazi gas chambers and the horrific experiments at Auschwitz and Imperial Japan’s Unit 731,” the center’s associate dean, Abraham Cooper, said in a statement.

Unit 731, the Japanese Imperial Army’s germ warfare division, is believed to have killed as many as 250,000 people in experiments during the 1930s and ‘40s, when Japanese troops occupied much of China.

“The crimes of the Nazi era are a stark reminder that silence is admittance and such state-sanctioned barbarities demand action,” Cooper said.

The BBC report said the North Korean man, identified as Kwon Hyok, was a former army intelligence officer who defected to South Korea in 1999. It also said that he was formerly chief guard at a North Korean prison camp, reportedly known as “Prison Camp No. 22.”

Totalitarian North Korea, which keeps out most foreigners and views outside criticism as an infringement on its sovereignty, most probably would not agree to any investigation on its soil.

An estimated 200,000 people are imprisoned in North Korea.