March 23, 2010
BANGKOK (AFP) - Sixteen North Korean asylum seekers, including three children, have been arrested in northern Thailand and charged with illegal entry, police said Tuesday.
The group were detained Monday in Nong Khai province after crossing the Mekong river from neighbouring Laos, local police said.
"They came from a village in North Korea... through China and Laos. It took them 20 days," a marine police officer in Nong Khai told AFP, saying the group included two girls and a boy, aged between three and eight.
North Koreans are fleeing their impoverished hardline communist homeland in rising numbers, partly because of continued food shortages.
Virtually all North Koreans seeking to leave their country cross into China, but they risk forced repatriation if caught there, so they often travel on to Southeast Asia in the hope of eventual resettlement in South Korea or the West.
