SKorea offers refuge to 13 NKorean restaurant workers

By Alex Jensen

SEOUL

South Korea has claimed that 12 female North Korean restaurant workers and their male manager have fled the premises in an unspecified foreign country and are now asking for refuge from the South.

The incident would be the first time on record that so many supposedly loyal staff members from an overseas North Korean restaurant have defected

A spokesperson for Seoul's unification ministry, Jeong Joon-hee, told reporters that North Korean restaurants abroad "are known to be feeling the pinch" of new United Nations sanctions.

The restrictions were imposed following the authoritarian state's fourth ever nuclear test earlier this year and subsequent long-range rocket launch.

Jeong claimed that the staff had been exposed to South Korean life through media while living outside their notoriously reclusive homeland -- the country they had been working in was not revealed for their protection.

Reports out of the South last month claimed that several North Korean restaurants had shut down in China amid the global squeeze on Pyongyang's sources of revenue for developing nuclear weapons.

Local news agency Yonhap cited government sources in reporting that around 130 North Korean restaurants in a dozen foreign nations such as China, Vietnam and Cambodia have been earning Pyongyang's regime $10 million annually.

Even though South Korea is known to have welcomed nearly 30,000 North Korean defectors since the 1990s, Jeong made a point of stating that the group of 13 had been accepted on "humanitarian grounds."

He admitted that this was a notable case given the recent strengthening of sanctions against the North.

The South operates centers where North Korean arrivals receive basic support and education to prepare them for life in their new capitalist home, but they are also screened to ensure that they are not spies.