ASIA PACIFIC

Time running out for South Korean POWs still in North

Now in their 80s and 90s, many will never return to homeland

Second lives: Kim Kyung-hee, 40, bursts into tears as she speaks with Lee Sun-woo, 82, on Wednesday in Seoul. Lee was captured by Chinese troops during the Korean War in July 1953, 13 days before the armistice was signed, and detained as a prisoner to work in a coal mine until he escaped from North Korea in 2006. Kim escaped from North Korea in 2012; her late father, Kim Woo-yong, worked in the same coal mine as Lee from 1953 to 2004. | THE WASHINGTON POST

The Washington Post

Jul 15, 2013

SEOUL –

Sixty years ago this month, a 21-year-old South Korean soldier named Lee Jae-won wrote a letter to his mother. He was somewhere in the middle of the peninsula, he wrote, and bullets were coming down like "raindrops." He said he was scared.

The next letter to arrive came days later from the South Korean military. It described a firefight in Paju, near the modern-day border between the North and South, and said Lee had been killed there in battle. His body had not been recovered.

"We never doubted his death," said Lee's younger brother, Lee Jae-seong. "It was the chaos of war, and you couldn't expect to recover a body."

Time running out for South Korean POWs still in North

Now in their 80s and 90s, many will never return to homeland

In your social network

In your inbox

In your social network

In your inbox