Dissidents from North Korea to their southern neighbor, who lived near the nuclear testing site, expressed concern about the health of their family members, who still live there, after strange symptoms that suggest they have been exposed to nuclear radiation.
The NBC website quoted Lee Jeong-hwa as saying she was in constant pain, adding that things would be worse when she returned home in North Korea.
"Many people have died, we started calling this phenomenon the 'stealth disease.'" We thought we were dying because we were poor and eating bad food, and now we knew that the cause of that disease was radiation. "
While I was rubbing her right leg, which has a slight handicap in the office of Sand, a non-governmental organization in South Korea's capital Seoul, defending human rights in North Korea, she recalled how she was arrested in an attempt to flee her country in 2003.
But in 2010 she managed to escape from her home in Kilgo County, the home of North Korea's nuclear testing site, Bungi-ri.
She told me what she had experienced in her last 7 years in North Korea, where Kim Jong Il, the then leader of the country, detonated a nuclear bomb near her home.
His son, Kim Yong-un, also tested four other bombs, and claimed that one of them, detonated in September, was a hydrogen bomb.
North Korea has repeatedly rejected accusations of human rights abuses and blames sanctions for the deteriorating humanitarian situation.
Pyongyang has been under UN sanctions since 2006 because of its missile and nuclear programs.