Days after North Korea’s most famous defector revealed some of the details in his accounts about life in prison camps weren’t true, the country’s government fired back Tuesday.
Shin Dong-hyuk’s “admission of his lies goes to prove that everything told by those who claim to be ‘defectors from the North’ cannot be trusted,” the state-run KCNA news agency said, citing a spokesman for North Korea’s Association for Human Rights Studies.
The government news agency called Shin a swindler who “styled himself a ‘survivor’ in the ‘concentration camp of political offenders’ that does not exist in (North Korea) no more than a sheer lie and a fiction.”
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Shin said in response that the government had taken his father hostage.
CNN’s Judy Kwon contributed to this report.