Bye-bye Kim | South Korea: Overseas North Korean restaurant workers flee

An unspecified number of North Koreans working at a Pyongyang-run restaurant overseas have escaped their workplace and will come to South Korea, South Korean officials said yesterday.
The announcement by Seoul’s Unification Ministry came after South Korean media reported that two or three female employees at a North Korean-run restaurant in China fled and went to an unidentified Southeast Asian country earlier this month.
It’s the second known group escape by North Korean restaurant workers dispatched abroad in recent weeks. In April, a group of 13 North Koreans who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo defected to South Korea.
The latest escapes will likely enrage Pyongyang, which typically accuses Seoul of trying to abduct or entice North Korean citizens to defect. South Korea has denied the accusation.

North Korean performers entertain customers at the Okryugwan restaurant in Beijing

After the 13 workers — a male manager and 12 waitresses — arrived in Seoul in April, Pyongyang claimed they were kidnapped by South Korean spies and repeatedly demanded their return. South Korea said the workers chose to resettle in the South on their own. It was the largest group defection by North Koreans to the South since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took power in 2011.
A brief Unification Ministry statement confirmed that some other North Korean restaurant workers abroad fled, but didn’t elaborate. Officials at the unification and foreign ministries refused to provide further details about the North Koreans and their escapes, citing worries about their safety and potential diplomatic problems with concerned countries. It was unclear when they would arrive in Seoul.
New Focus, a Seoul-based online news outlet run by a North Korean defector, was among the first to break the news Monday. It said the group comprised three women in their 20s who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant near Shanghai.
The defector head of New Focus, who uses the pseudonym Jang Jin-sung in interviews because of worries about the safety of relatives left behind in the North, said yesterday that the information came from people who guided the North Koreans after they escaped from their restaurant. He refused to identify the guides.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported yesterday that the North Koreans had worked at a restaurant in the central Chinese city of Xian and that they may have traveled to Thailand. Kim Tong-Hyung, Seoul, AP