N. Korea Family Sets Record With Escape

A family of 17, the biggest group of North Korean defectors since the Korean War, arrived in South Korea on Monday, six weeks after launching an epic escape through China and Hong Kong.

The band of men, women and children included a security guard whose job was to stop just such defections through the wild and remote North Korea-China border.

South Korean news media said the defection might presage a mass exodus of North Koreans from the economically strapped country, but government officials disagreed.

South Korean Unification Minister Kwon O Ki said the incident appeared to be isolated. “It’s a defection of one family, not different people, which lessens its significance,” he said.

The family’s escape was financed by relatives in the United States who sent money to pay guides to protect them in a southern trek down the length of China that started Oct. 26.

In a saga that was the stuff of Hollywood films, the band passed from one safe house to another among 2 million ethnic Koreans in China, posing as a group of traveling rural laborers and even occasionally working in fields.

On Nov. 23, they were smuggled into Hong Kong and freedom was then just Monday’s three-hour flight away.

Tearful, smiling and bewildered, the family’s journey ended at Kimpo Airport in Seoul at dusk.

Kim Kyong Ho, the 62-year-old patriarch of the group, exclaimed to the South Korean brother he had not seen since the height of the Korean War more than 40 years ago: “Older brother!”

Kim Kyong Tae, 70, said the brothers had been separated amid the chaos of war. The younger Kim ended up in North Korea at the end of the bloody conflict. He said he was persecuted there for his South Korean roots.

During their brief reunion, both brothers, overcome with emotion, at times had to rest in wheelchairs.

The younger Kim--surrounded by his wife, five sons and daughters, one seven months pregnant, their spouses, five grandchildren, and the border guard cousin who made the escape possible across the frozen Tumen river--told reporters:

“I’m full of emotion that all my family has made it safely. We thank you countrymen for your warm welcome to our family.”

The only person missing was Choi Yong Do, the 79-year-old father of Kim’s wife, Choi Hyun Sil, 57. From his home in New York he organized the financing that allowed the group to bribe its way through China and into Hong Kong.