‘We Could Have Faced the Death Penalty’: Man Who Escaped North Korea Tells of Having to Keep Church ‘Secret’
A North Korean man who escaped the country after being arrested, and was granted asylum in the United States, is telling his story of how he had to keep a church he founded underground and secret, else he possibly be put to death.
“There were about nine people,” Choi Kwanghyuk told Fox News. “I couldn’t do mission work because we had to keep it secret that we had a church.”
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“If that information had leaked,” he added, “we could have faced the death penalty.”
Sometimes, Kwanghyuk said, services were held in the mountains or by the river, or even literally underground.
“We’d meet in this rectangular hole and use [a] lantern to study the Bible,” he told the Christian Post. “Since we cannot sing out loud, we praised by humming the hymn.”
In 2008, Kwanghyuk was discovered by authorities, and arrested. He was interrogated about his faith by security department representatives while in prison, and tortured.
Just as he was about to be sent away to a labor camp, Kwanghyuk broke free.
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“I decided to escape because I thought that once they sent me to the other camp, they could eventually send me to the concentration camp or kill me,” he explained. “I was traveling back and forth between China and North Korea, but they kept searching for me, and I knew it could put my friends in danger too, so I left.”
Kwanghyuk applied
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at Christian News
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