The project has been going for three years now almost 20,000 files are already online and freely available, with an estimated 100,000 more waiting to be processed. Working slowly and painstakingly, the group is also compiling and mapping other lists: the secret prisons, the execution sites, the mass graves, the identities of perpetrators. The effort involves bringing together tens of thousands of documents, records, images and more. Someone might know my brother’s situation. Defectors such as Lee Han-byeol, who now spends much of her time working to bring other North Koreans safely to South Korea, are often the best sources, though details are scarce.Īnyone can check the database. Now entering its eighth decade, the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea remains heavily guarded from international observers even western intelligence agencies struggle to acquire reliable information. “There is no way to truly know whether they are alive or not,” Lee says. And he is one of an unknown number, possibly millions, who have disappeared inside North Korea and who are feared lost to their families, and to history, for ever. He is one of hundreds of thousands to be detained in the kwanliso, the Kim regime’s political prison camps. He is one of thousands of refugees who have escaped from North Korea into China only to be arrested and returned. If her brother is still alive, he would be in his mid-forties.Īs a statistic, Lee Se-il fits into a number of classifications.

The only result was a second-hand glimpse: he was apparently still in a prison camp in North Hamgyong province, near the country’s borders with China and Russia. She made phone calls and sent messages through a network of middlemen in China, and her family still inside North Korea bribed officials for information. Lee fled North Korea in 1999 the last sighting of her brother was a decade later © Ashley CrowtherĪ few years ago Lee attempted to find out more. The owner of a guesthouse who had briefly harboured him relayed that he was beaten savagely, and that his hands and feet were wrapped in bandages because of acute frostbite. Speaking in her small office in the northern outskirts of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, she says the last clear sighting of her brother was in 2009, when he was in the custody of the Kim regime after attempting to escape.Ĭhina’s security forces had apprehended him in the borderlands and he was transported back to North Korea.

Lee, who fled North Korea through China in 1999, is now 38.

Grim dawn map disappeared