A group of 13 North Koreans working at a restaurant in an unidentified country defected together to South Korea this week, Seoul's unification ministry said Friday.
The South Korean government declined to provide any personal information about the group or identify the route they took in defecting, the Yonhap News Agency reports.
The group, including one male manager and 12 female employees, arrived in South Korea on Thursday, according to the ministry that oversees inter-Korean affairs.
South Korea’s spy agency estimates that North Korea runs about 130 restaurants in other countries — about 100 in China and the others in Russia, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
Restaurants operated abroad are an important source of hard currency income for Pyongyang but have faced economic difficulties since the U.N. Security council imposed sanctions on North Korea for its recent nuclear test and long-range rocket launch.
"It marked the first time that a group of North Koreans at the same restaurant has opted to come to South Korea at once," Jeong Joon-hee, a ministry spokesman, told reporters in Seoul, according to Yonhap. "The government has accepted their request to come to South Korea on humanitarian grounds."
Friday's public announcement is unusual for South Korea, which usually keeps a low-profile about defections.
The defectors told South Korean officials that they learned about the South and began to distrust North Korean propaganda by watching South Korean TV dramas and movies and from searching the Internet while living overseas, Jeong said.
The Unification Ministry’s website says more than 29,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea as of March, although group defections are rare.
The Associated Press called a number of North Korean restaurants in Asia, and all were open except one located in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Danang, Vietnam. A person who answered the telephone at the hotel said the Pyongyang Restaurant had closed two weeks ago and all the Korean staff had left the country. She declined to provide more details or identify herself. It was unclear whether the restaurant was connected to the defections.
In a report to the U.N. General Assembly in October last year, Marzuki Darusman, a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said more than 50,000 North Koreans are working in foreign countries, mostly in China and Russia, providing a source of money for Pyongyang.
He cited various studies, including a 2012 report by the International Network for the Human Rights of North Korean Overseas Labor that estimated North Korea was earning as much as $2.3 billion annually from the workers it sent abroad, the AP reports.
