Human experimentation in North Korea

The reports of North Korean human experimentation describe suffocation of prisoners in gas chambers, testing deadly chemical weapons, and surgery without anesthesia.

Human experimentation was described by several North Korean defectors, including former prisoner Lee Soon-ok, former prison guards Kwon Hyok and Ahn Myung Chul, and others. This testimony was corroborated by documents brought from Camp 22 in North Korea. In Lee's testimony to the U.S. Senate and in her prison memoir Eyes of the Tailless Animals (published in 1999) she recounted witnessing two instances of lethal human experimentation. An episode of the BBC television programme This World detailed some of the allegations. The claims have been described as "plausible" by a senior US official.

Lee described an experiment in which 50 healthy women prisoners were selected and given poisoned cabbage leaves. All of the women were required to eat the cabbage, despite cries of distress from those who had already eaten. All 50 died after 20 minutes of vomiting blood and anal bleeding. Refusing to eat the cabbage would allegedly have meant reprisals against them and their families.

Kwon Hyok, a former head of security at Camp 22, described laboratories equipped with gas chambers for suffocation gas experiments, in which three or four people, normally a family, are the experimental subjects. After undergoing medical checks, the chambers are sealed and poison is injected through a tube, while scientists observe from above through glass. In a report reminiscent of an earlier account of a family of seven, Kwon claims to have watched one family of two parents, a son and a daughter die from suffocating gas, with the parents trying to save the children using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for as long as they had the strength.

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