Son Jong-nam

Son Jong-nam (11 March 1958 – 7 December 2008) was a North Korean defector and Christian missionary, who died in a Pyongyang prison after being arrested in 2006.

Early life Son was born in Chongjin, North Hamgyong. From 1973 to 1983, he served in the Korean People's Army as part of the presidential security service, rising to the rank of master sergeant; following his discharge, he began working at performing arts centre run by the military. Around 1992, he had one daughter. In 1997, his wife, pregnant with their second child, was arrested for allegedly insulting Kim Jong-il's mismanagement of the economy and blaming him for the North Korean famine. She was beaten while in custody, suffering a miscarriage as a result. That same year, Son's brother Son Jong-hun (손정훈) was charged with the illegal export of strategic items, and fled to China; he maintains that the charges were false. Todd Nettleton of American Christian organisation Voice of the Martyrs also attempted to organise people in the United States and South Korea to bring international pressure to bear on the North Korean government over the issue of Son's imprisonment.

Son's brother believes that the international pressure led North Korean authorities to cancel his public execution, only to switch to torturing him to death as a less public method of killing him. According to a November 2009 statement from a fellow State Security Department prison inmate, Son died there on December 7, 2008.