‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death,’ says Kwon Hyuk, as he remembers his time running a concentration camp in North Korea.
‘Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’
As chief of management at Camp 22, buried in the remote mountains of North Hamgyong, it was once his job to watch the cruel experiments on political prisoners.
‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said in frank comments to the BBC in 2004.
‘The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying,’ he said, but desperately tried to resuscitate their children until their last breath.
Camp 22 was reportedly closed eight years later, in 2012. And North Korea rebuked the claims as part of a US-inspired ‘smear campaign’.
But Kwon Hyuk, who spoke out in the hope that the regime’s evils would at last be exposed, is joined by hundreds of voices corroborating his stark assessment of the ‘banality of evil’ in our times.
A North Korean soldier looks out from behind barbed wire at a camp
A South Korean soldier, left, experiences what it is like to be held in a North Korean cell at the Korean War exhibition in Seoul in 2010
North Korean despot Kim Jong Un grins during a visit to a special forces training session at an undisclosed location in North Korea on April 4, 2025
Soon Ok-lee, a mother and wife, was imprisoned for seven years at one of the North Korean camps.
In her 1999 book, Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman, she described the horrors of being falsely accused, tortured and jailed.
Within the confines of Kaechon concentration camp, in Pyungbuk province, she said she witnessed gross acts of experimentation committed against prisoners by staff.
One day, she said, she was ordered to give poison to 50 healthy female prisoners.
‘One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women,’ she later told the BBC.
‘I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them.
‘They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain.
‘As soon as they ate it, blood came out from their mouth and anus,’ she later told NBC.
‘And they died. I saw that in 20 or 30 minutes they died like this in that place.’
Soon told the outlet the staff were ‘biochemical testing’ with a new substance, poisoning prisoners to check its efficacy.
‘I cannot forget that image. She said. I wonder how a human being can kill another healthy human like that.’
The order was given by Kim Jong Il, she said.
‘I saw so many poor victims. Hundreds of people became victims of biochemical testing.’
She said that she was imprisoned in 1987, while working as a manager of a product supply office.
The economy went into recession and the supply of materials was not in good condition, she said.
‘That’s why I was imprisoned.’
Over the next seven years, she would be beaten with belts, forced to drink water and stamped on until ‘the water came out of my mouth and anus’, and fed on just 100 grams of corn for each meal.
In that time, she said, her spine started to shrink under the intense conditions of forced labour in an ironworks factory.
‘I looked like a strange animal,’ she said.
Many did not survive. Soon described witnessing public executions and the torture of men, women and children.
She said that political prisoners were forbidden from having children, so pregnant mothers were injected with saltwater to try to kill the baby – even at eight or nine months of pregnancy.
‘From time to time there a living infant is delivered, and then if someone delivers a live infant, then the guards kick the bloody baby and kill it.’
Starved to the point of exhaustion, she said prisoners would try to catch the many rats scurrying around the complex.
‘When we could catch rats we thought it was a fortunate day. If we were found catching rats we were put in a separate solitary cell. When we caught a rat, we didn’t cook it. We just ate it.’
Sketches commissioned by defector Kim Kwang-il depicted the horrific torture of prisoners
Corpses left in the gulag: ‘The mice eat the eyes, nose, ears, and toes of the corpses’
Guards observe as prisoners are made to stay in stress positions until exhaustion
Soon’s story is sadly not unique. Defectors have managed to extract secret documents detailing evidence of the use of gas chambers in North Korean prisons.
Lin Hun-hwa, a victim, was named in a report from Camp 22 doing nothing to conceal the abuse taking place within.
‘The above person is transferred from…camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons,’ read a transfer letter dated February 2002.
Kwon Hyok, a former prison Head of Security at Camp 22, told the BBC that laboratories had been fitted to deliver poison gas and suffocation gas as part of ghastly experiments on inmates.
Three or four people, usually a family, would be shepherded into a chamber after undergoing medical checks.
The chambers would be sealed and gas fed in through a tube as scientists stood by to observe.
While North Korea said the story was a fiction, BBC reporter Olenka Frenkiel said she had independent confirmation that the defector was genuine, and had seen documentation confirming an inmate’s transfer for human experimentation.
Im Cheon-yong corroborated with similar claims.
An officer in North Korea’s special forces, Im said he was privy to tests on prisoners aimed at bolstering the military with biological and chemical warfare threats.
‘For the biological and chemical warfare tests, we needed “objects”,’ he told German outlet DW in 2014.
‘At first, they used the chemical agents on mice and showed us how they died.
‘Then we watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies. I saw it with my own eyes.’
He said that he decided to flee the country after seeing children with mental and physical disabilities being used as test subjects for experimental weapons.
‘The regime wants to do this “legally” so they offer to buy disabled children from their parents,’ he told the Telegraph.
‘If that doesn’t work, they threaten them.’
Im said that experiments on humans in North Korea dated back at least to the late 1960s, testing chemical and biological weapons for military use on citizens.
‘They use anthrax bacterium as well as 40 different types of chemical weapons that the regime has developed itself,’ he told DW.
‘Through these experiments, they know the effects of the weapons and the amounts to be used.’
Kim Myong-chol, executive director of The Centre for North Korea-US Peace, dismissed the claims as ‘nonsense’ retold to ‘make money by attracting the attention of South Korea and the U.S.’
But Japanese academic Toshimitsu Shigemura told DW there were ‘too many of these stories now for them not to be true’.
Pictured: Inmates at a North Korean prison camp. Defectors have described the horrors of experimentation on prisoners using chemical and biological weapons
Starving prisoners line up to face another day of gruelling forced labour in some of the first ever photos to show inmates at a North Korean prison camp (taken in 2021)
A North Korean prison policewoman stands guard behind fences at a jail on the banks of Yalu River, opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong, May 8, 2011
One such story came from a defector identified only by his surname, Lee.
Lee, a former North Korean biological weapons scientist, was said to have fled a research facility in the hermit kingdom in June 2015, taking with him what he claimed was 15 gigabytes of evidence on human experiments.
‘His ostensible reason for defection is that he felt sceptical about his research,’ a source from a North Korean human rights agency told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
Greg Scarlatoiun, director of the US-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat that Lee’s claims sounded plausible.
‘We have been told similar stories in the past that human experiments are carried out in prison camps,’ he said.
In 2023, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification compiled reports of such violations in a mammoth 450-page document based on the testimonies of more than 500 North Korean defectors.
According to the report, officials at the North Korean Ministry of Social Security were allegedly blackmailing families into letting their relatives become human test subjects under the threat of sending them to prison camps.
Human subjects were reported to have secretly been fed sleeping pills and forcibly taken to a facility called Hospital 83 to undergo various experiments.
Disabled people, particularly those with dwarfism, were also deprived of their human rights and had medical procedures conducted on them against their wills.
In 2015, nurses at one hospital were reportedly told to create a ‘list of dwarfs’ which was then used to prevent people with dwarfism from giving birth.
One woman with dwarfism was allegedly forced to undergo a hysterectomy – a surgical procedure to remove her womb and prevent her from having a child – in 2017.
Rampant state-led rights abuses were said to have taken place in communities, prison camps and elsewhere, including public executions, torture and arbitrary arrests.
Women in detention were subjected to inhumane conditions including torture, forced labor, sexual violence and starvation.
Everyday torture: One of the drawings by the guards, simply titled ‘Detention centre’ seems to depict a guard forcing a prisoner into a small opening in a wall
This drawing depicts prisoners foraging among live wild animals. In the Korean description: ‘out of starvation and hunger, find snakes and rats and you eat them’
A North Korean soldier looks out from behind a barbed wire fence around a camp on the North Korean river banks across from Hekou, June 3 , 2009
North Korea remains one of the most elusive places on earth.
Isolationism is built into its history – a policy in the north broken only by 35 years as a protectorate of Japan in the early 20th century.
From behind thick walls, the country holds on to its conception of ‘freedom’ through the imposition of strict security controls and a zero-tolerance approach to dissent.
But even further away from view, even more sinister characteristics of a dystopian state are said to exist under the guise of scientific inquiry.
Defectors claim to have witnessed barbaric ‘experiments’ on human beings – mothers, fathers and children – in the name of preparing an army.
To the camp commanders, the ends are justified by the means. Painting dissenters as enemies of the state, ‘I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all’.
