Kim Seongmin, a former military propagandist who fled North Korea by jumping off a train, defected to the South and from there, as a human rights campaigner, broadcast news to his isolated home country in the face of death threats, died on Friday in Seoul. He was 63.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his station, Free North Korea Radio, which is based in Seoul. He told The New York Times last November that cancer that had started in his lungs had spread to his liver and brain, and that doctors were giving him only months to live.
Although he could not work or sleep without painkillers, Mr. Kim continued to broadcast twice a day into his last weeks. His reports, by shortwave radio, brought North Koreans information that they could not get at home because all news media there is controlled by the government.
Free North Korea Radio has aimed to chip away at the personality cult that underpins the totalitarian rule of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. North Korea has compared South Korean television shows known as K-drama and other outside media content reaching its people to a “vicious cancer.”
It has enacted new laws in recent years to suppress such material by imprisoning people who watch or possess it and exacting even harsher punishment, including execution by firing squad, of those who put movies, K-pop videos and other material in the hands of North Koreans.
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