Ahn Myong-Chol saw many nightmarish atrocities during his years as a prison guard – including one horrific incident in which ferocious dogs attacked and killed innocent school kids, according to a shocking new report.
“There were three dogs and they killed five children,” the 45-year-old Ahn told the French news agency AFP.
“They killed three of the children right away. The two other children were barely breathing and the guards buried them alive,” said Ahn, who worked in one of the communist country’s brutal prison camps for eight years before fleeing in 1994.
A day later, guards rewarded the murderous mutts with a special meal, “as some kind of award,” Ahn said.
“People in the camps are not treated as human beings. They are like flies that can be crushed,” said Ahn, speaking at a conference for human rights activists was under way in Geneva.
He was one of many North Koreans who had fled the hellish country and testified for a United Nations investigation that led to a stomach-churning 400-page report on rampant human rights abuses in North Korea.
Ahn first worked as a banker in South Korea after fleeing the North, but has since dedicated his life to exposing systematic atrocities perpetrated by the North Korean regime against its own people.
“It’s my life’s mission to spread awareness about what is happening in the camps,” said Ahn, who now heads up the human rights group Free NK Gulag.
The UN estimates there are as many as 120,000 political prisoners in North Korea.
Now married with two daughters, a guilt-wracked Ahn can’t shake his memories of the horrors he witnessed – telling AFP that guards are brainwashed so that they see all prisoners as subhuman and evil.
Guards were told to practice their martial arts skills on prisoners – and ordered to shoot to kill if anyone tried to bust out.
“We were allowed to kill them, and if we brought back their body, they would award us by letting us go study at college,” he said.
Ahn said he had beaten and abused many prisoners but claimed he never killed anyone.
He became disillusioned when he was assigned as a driver and travelled from camp to camp, which gave him a chance to talk to a number of prisoners.
“More than 90 percent” had no clue why they had been imprisoned, he said.
He learned first-hand that many prisoners were sent to the camps solely because a member of their family had committed a real or imagined offense.
While on leave the same year he fled, he found out his father had killed himself after he got drunk and criticized the government.
Ahn’s mother, sister and brother were taken away, never to be seen again.
He returned to his assignment at the camp, but grew fearful his own days were numbered.
So he drove his truck to the the Du Man River and swam to China, eventually making his way to South Korea, the news agency reported.
Ahn said the shocking UN report was vitally important because it opened the world’s eyes to the ongoing atrocities.
“The difference is that in North Korea we are still talking in the present tense. These horrors are still happening,” he said.