North Korea’s highest court has sentenced a Canadian pastor to a life term of hard labour for “crimes against the state”, reports say.
Hyeon Soo Lim, 60, was arrested in the capital Pyongyang after he travelled there in January for humanitarian work.
The Toronto-based pastor, who is of South Korean origin, reportedly confessed earlier to a “subversive plot” to overthrow the government and set up a “religious state”.
North Korea bans religious activity.
The authorities periodically detain foreigners for religious or missionary activity and similar cases have seen staged public confessions from prisoners.
‘False propaganda’
Mr Lim was reportedly given the sentence after a brief trial at the North Korean supreme court.
The court found him guilty of joining the US and South Korea in an anti-North Korea human rights “racket” and fabricating and circulating false propaganda materials tarnishing the country’s image, China’s Xinhua news agency reports.
He was also accused of funding and helping “defectors” to escape, in some cases through Mongolia, Xinhua adds.
North Korean state media KCNA have not reported the court’s decision.
Mr Lim and his colleagues travelled to Pyongyang on 31 January as part of a humanitarian mission. His family said it was to support a nursing home, nursery and orphanage.
Mr Lim, who heads the Light Korean Presbyterian Church, had made numerous humanitarian aid missions to North Korea for nearly two decades, the Church said.
He was detained in February and in July a KCNA report said Mr Lim had given a press conference in Pyongyang where he admitted to using humanitarian work as a “guise” for “subversive plots and activities in a sinister bid to build a religious state”.
He also reportedly admitted to giving lectures that “North Korea should be collapsed with the love of ‘God'”, and to helping the US and South Korea to aid North Korean defectors.
BBC
UM– USEKE.RW
