Veteran disowns Korean war confession

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/veterean-disowns-north-korea-confession

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Merrill Newman, the US war veteran who was arrested while on holiday in North Korea, has said he was coerced into making the video confession that helped secure his release.

Newman, 85, said in a statement two days after arriving back in California that he was kept under guard in a North Korean hotel for more than a month and his interrogator told him he would be sentenced to jail for 15 years if he did not co-operate. "Anyone who knows me knows that I could not have done the things they had me 'confess' to," Newman said. The Korean war veteran arrived at San Francisco airport on Saturday following his release and, when asked by a reporter about the confession, said it was "not my English".

Newman was a US special forces soldier in the 1950-53 war and worked with guerrillas fighting behind the lines against the communists in the north.

He was taken off a flight on 26 October as he was about to leave North Korea at the end of a tourist visit. The California man was held for crimes the North said he committed during the war, when he was a lieutenant with a US army unit nicknamed the White Tigers to advise a group of partisans who fought deep behind enemy lines. Newman said that during his tourist trip he expressed interest in visiting some of those "who fought in the war" in the Mount Kuwol area where he operated in wartime. "The North Koreans seem to have misinterpreted my curiosity as something more sinister," he said. "It is now clear to me the North Koreans still feel much more anger about the war than I realised. With the benefit of hindsight I should have been more sensitive to that." North Korea had called Newman a war criminal, saying he masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the state "and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People's Army and innocent civilians". The regime said he was deported on humanitarian grounds and because he had admitted to his wrongdoing and apologised. In an ungrammatical statement he read out on North Korean state media, Newman said he knew the former partisans he had worked with during the war had escaped to South Korea but he wanted to find their remaining families and relatives. Newman also said in the videotaped message that he had a "plan to meet any surviving soldiers." In his statement to US media on Monday Newman said his confession was not voluntary and in speaking it he made a point of emphasising the bad grammar. Newman, a former manufacturing and finance executive who lives in a retirement community in the upscale city of Palo Alto, said North Korean authorities looked after his health and fed him well. Some of Newman's fellow soldiers in the Korean war have said they would not have visited North Korea. But Pyongyang has allowed other American veterans of the war to visit, a fact Newman noted in his latest statement. Newman's wife, Lee, had previously told CNN that Newman made the visit "to put some closure" on that aspect of his life.

Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American who worked as a Christian missionary, remains imprisoned in North Korea after he was convicted in May of crimes against the state and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour. US leaders have called on North Korea to release Bae, as they did in Newman's case.

Newman also expressed hope that Bae "will be allowed to rejoin his family".

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