Prisoners killed by gas – report

NORTH KOREA is using political prisoners held in its extensive gulag network as subjects for chemical weapons tests, according to a report in the US.

The allegations have been made in the latest report on Pyongyang’s chemical weapons capabilities by 38 North, the respected website operated by the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and are based on testimony from both prisoners and former guards who managed to defect.

One defector who served as a security official at Detention Camp 22 described tests in which healthy prisoners were placed inside glass chambers and technicians monitored the effects as gas was pumped into the chambers.

‘‘Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners,’’ Kwon Kyok, a pseudonym, said in a documentary cited by the report.

‘‘Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.

‘‘I watched a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber: parents, one son and a daughter,’’ he said.

‘‘The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.

‘‘For the first time it hit me that even prisoners are capable of powerful human affection.’’