Activist Tells of Torture in North Korea Prison By MARK McDONALD

SEOUL, South Korea — An evangelical activist from Arizona, imprisoned by North Korea last year after he illegally entered the country on Christmas Day, appeared Wednesday on South Korean television and spoke for the first time about his treatment by his captors.

The activist, Robert Park, 29, a Korean-American who was released in February after 43 days of detention, gave a harrowing account of his imprisonment, which he said included beatings, torture and sexual abuse.
“The scars and wounds of the things that happened to me in North Korea are too intense,” Mr. Park said in an interview with the South Korean broadcaster KBS. “As a result of what happened to me in North Korea, I’ve thrown away any kind of personal desire. I will never, you know, be able to have a marriage or any kind of relationship.”

Mr. Park said he attempted suicide soon after he returned to the United States. He told the magazine Christianity Today that he had been “in and out” of psychiatric hospitals for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had crossed into North Korea over the frozen Tumen River, which forms the border with China. He carried only a Bible and some letters urging the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, to close prison labor camps in the North, free all its prisoners and resign.

Analysts in Seoul said such personal affronts to Mr. Kim were forbidden in the North and typically drew long prison terms or death sentences. But Mr. Park told friends in Seoul before he left that he would die with political prisoners in the North if Mr. Kim refused to free them.

Mr. Park read a confession on North Korean television, after which North Korean officials said they “decided to leniently forgive and release him, taking his admission and sincere repentance of his wrongdoings into consideration,” according to a report at the time by the North’s official news agency, K.C.N.A.
But Mr. Park said Wednesday that the apology was a fake, and that the statement had been dictated to him.
He said that he had a new appreciation for the harshness and cynicism of the North Korean government, which he vowed to devote his life to fighting.

“They have really thought about this,” he said. “How can we kill these people? How can we starve these people? How can we enslave these people? How can we control these people?”
Robert R. King, President Obama’s envoy on North Korean human rights issues, has called North Korea “one of the worst places in terms of lack of human rights.”