North Korea expelled a team of BBC journalists Monday as a direct result of their recent reporting from Pyongyang, where more than 100 foreign journalists gathered last week to cover the country’s first party congress in 36 years.
BBC on Monday said that three of its journalists had landed safely in Beijing after being detained, interrogated and eventually expelled from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were about to leave North Korea on Friday when they were unexpectedly stopped by local officials, according to the network.
Mr. Wingfield-Hayes, a correspondent for BBC Tokyo, was questioned for eight hours by North Korean officials and forced to sign a statement before he was reunited with his colleagues and allowed to leave the country, BBC reported.
“When he reached the airport on Friday, he was separated from the rest of his team, prevented from boarding that flight, taken to a hotel and interrogated by the security bureau here in Pyongyang before being made to sign a statement and then released, eventually allowed to rejoin us here in this hotel,” said BBC correspondent John Sudworth.
The BBC was one of several news outlets that dispatched reporters to Pyongyang last week to cover the first Worker Party’s congress in nearly four decades. North Korean officials said, however, that BBC’s journalists filed reports rife with misrepresentations.
At a press conference Monday, O Ryong Il, secretary general of the North Korea’s National Peace Committee, accused the BBC journalists of disrespecting local customs and distorting facts in their reports.
“They were speaking very ill of the system of the leadership of the country when they should have been reporting very fairly, objectively and very correctly,” he said.
In one recent dispatch, Mr. Wingfield-Hayes reported western journalists were taken to a hospital where there wasn’t a real doctor in sight, and said “Everything we see looks like a set-up.”
In another, the journalist questioned the role of Kim Jong-un, the 33-year-old dictator who assumed control over North Korea following the passing of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011.
“What exactly he’s done to deserve the title marshal is hard to say. On state TV the young ruler seems to spend a lot of time sitting in a large chair watching artillery firing at mountainsides,” the journalist reported.
“This country appears obsessed with portraying an image of strength and perfection,” he added. “The level of control and nervousness we have experienced betrays the weakness and insecurity that lies beneath.”
Mr. Wingfield-Hayes had been sent to Pyongyang not to report from the Workers Party’s congress, but to cover a trip attended by Nobel laureates who were visiting ahead of the the historic political event, Newsweek reported.
Ms. Byrne, BBC’s producer during the Pyongyang trip, tweeted last week that North Korean police at one point confiscated a cellphone belonging to the network and deleted footage that had been recorded, and accused law enforcement of acting like thugs.
Upon arrival in Beijing on Monday, the BBC journalists declined to make any statements and acknowledged that some of their colleagues were still in North Korea.
“We are very disappointed that our reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team have been deported from North Korea after the government took offense at material he had filed,” a BBC spokesman said in a statement Monday. “Four BBC staff, who were invited to cover the Workers Party Congress, remain in North Korea and we expect them to be allowed to continue their reporting.”
Independent watchdog group Freedom House has ranked North Korea among the worst with respect to press freedoms, and said the nation remained “one of the most repressive media environments in the world” as of 2015.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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