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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/26/60minutes/main982127.shtml
Jenkins Photo Proof Of Kidnapping?
Oct. 26, 2005
(CBS) A never-before-seen photo obtained by 60 Minutes raises new
questions about one of the most bizarre incidents of espionage in
modern history.
The photo comes from U.S. army deserter Robert Jenkins, who spent 39
years in North Korea and was released just last year.
It seems, at first glance, like a typical family snapshot. Jenkins sits
beside his wife and oldest child on a beach in North Korea. But the new
and potentially explosive information concerns a woman in the left-hand
corner of the frame. Jenkins says she is a Thai national who was
kidnapped by North Korean agents from Macau, near Hong Kong, in 1978.
If what Jenkins says is true, it would represent the first photographic
evidence that North Korea abducted ordinary citizens from Asian
countries other than Japan and South Korea.
The abduction of foreign citizens by North Korean agents has been a big
issue in Japan ever since North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted in
2002 that his country had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the late
1970s and early 1980s. The abductees were used to teach Japanese
language and customs to North Korean spies. Kim Jong Il told Japan’s
prime minister those responsible had been punished, and he allowed the
five surviving abductees to return home.
But Kim Jong Il’s confession led the families of other missing Japanese
to wonder whether their loved ones had also been abducted by North
Korea. The Japanese have sought more information from Kim’s regime.
Meanwhile in South Korea, the government says 486 of its citizens have
been abducted by the North and are still being held against their will.
In a book recently published in Japan, Jenkins writes, "I saw many
people from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia who I am sure had been
snatched, and many of the Europeans and Middle Easterners I knew, saw,
or met in North Korea were, for one reason or another, unable to leave
the country due to obstacles that the North Koreans purposely
constructed to keep them there. … It is a tragedy, in my opinion, that
more countries don't investigate further…. I am certain there are
abductees from all over the world in North Korea."
Jenkins identifies the woman in the background of the photograph as
Anoche (or Anocha) Panjoy. He says he knew her well because she was
married to his best friend in North Korea, fellow U.S. army deserter
Larry Abshier, who died of a heart attack in 1983.
Anoche said she came from a small farming community approximately 120
miles from Bangkok, Jenkins recalls. In 1978, she was working in a
bathhouse in Macau, a former Portuguese colony that is now a special
administrative region of China.
According to Jenkins, Anoche said she had been grabbed, tied up,
drugged, and taken over a large hill or "mountain," where she was then
put in a boat and taken to North Korea.
“She told me…. It was two or three more girls they got the same night,"
Jenkins told 60 Minutes. “Put 'em on the same boat and brought them all
to Korea.”
Anoche was in her 20s when she was abducted, Jenkins says. The photo of
her was taken in 1985, after she had been in North Korea for seven
years. "She begged them to send her home many times," Jenkins says.
“They said to her, 'Why do you complain? You’re much better off here
than you were before.':”
After her husband’s death in 1983, Anoche continued to live in the same
apartment building as Jenkins and his wife. But she later moved out and
remarried. Jenkins says he and his wife have not seen her since 1989.
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