North Korea slams defector over inaccuracies in story

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.”

Shin said in response that the government had taken his father hostage.

CNN’s Judy Kwon contributed to this report.

CNN