The 53-year-old man, identified as Ko Hyon-chol, confessed to trying to kidnap two North Korean orphan girls and take them to the South, the agencies reported.
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Detainee Ko Hyon Chol told a news conference in Pyongyang on Friday that he apologized for a crime he called “unforgivable”.
Seoul demanded Pyongyang immediate release Ko, and other South Korean citizens now detained in North Korea.
He was arrested in the North in May after crossing the border from China.
Ko was marched into the People’s Palace of Culture by two uniformed soldiers and put in a chair beneath two large photos of former leaders Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il.
Namely, in South Korea, players are flocking to a seaside town called Sokcho in the northern part of the country.
Ko said South Korean agents told him in May to arrange the abduction of orphans, promising £7,500 for each child.
“The vice foreign ministers of the three countries shared the view that the North’s pursuit of nuclear and missile development poses a grave and direct threat to them, and hurts peace and stability not only on the Korean Peninsula but the global community as a whole”, the ministry said in a press release.
Ko originally fled in January 2013 because he had been involved in smuggling and was being investigated by Pyongyang authorities. ‘So I set about abducting children but it wasn’t easy’.
The report comes after North Korea accused the NIS of abducting 13 people who worked in a restaurant run by the North in China in April.
Evidence shown at the press conference includes a flashlight, two rubber boats employed to carry the kidnapped girls, new clothes to be given to the children, mobile phones he used to contact South Korean intelligence and a room card of a hotel where he stayed.
North Korea is now holding at least four South Korean detainees who have been arrested since 2013, including Ko.
After living in China for a year he moved to South Korea in 2014 via Laos and Thailand, and claimed he sought out a defectors’ organisation after struggling to adjust to his new life and being unable to find work to support himself.
It warned Pyongyang to stop “illegally arresting” its citizens and using them for a “war of propaganda”.
“While strongly condemning these blatant violations of global obligations by North Korea, we have agreed to further strengthen our trilateral cooperation and policy coordination to counter these repeated provocations”, the transcript provided by the foreign ministry said.
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Japan, South Korea and the United States, during vice foreign minister-level talks on Thursday in Hawaii (Friday Japan time), jointly recognized that a recent ruling by an worldwide arbitration court denying China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea has legally binding force based on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
