Out of the North Korean Gulag

By Josh Tyrangiel

Park Choong Il has escaped from North Korea. Again. This time he doesn't expect to be going back. Park, an unemployed 23-year-old, fled to Russia in 1999, but despite receiving refugee status from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, he was returned to North Korea with assurances that nothing would happen to him. Nothing, it turns out, but excruciating torture. Park says he was held captive, beaten with iron chains and forced to lick the toilet hole in his cell. In April, with help from a Japan-based human-rights group, Park escaped to Southeast Asia, where he is hiding in a secret location. But he could soon be testifying before U.S. lawmakers eager for evidence of North Korean human-rights abuses. With Beijing and Moscow insisting that North Korean refugees don't face persecution at home, Park is the strongest living evidence that something is definitely rotten in Pyongyang.

--Reported by Donald Macintyre/Seoul and Robert Horn/Bangkok

With reporting by Donald Macintyre/Seoul and Robert Horn/Bangkok