Timothy Cho, a North Korean defector now living in the UK, has described the harrowing experience of being forced to witness public executions as a child. At just 11 years old, he sat in the front row as three policemen shot a tied-up prisoner with nine bullets, each targeting three parts of the body. "Each time it goes into the cobbled part, especially when it goes onto your brain, it pops out," he recalled.
Abandonment and Homelessness
Born in the 1980s in Onsong, a town in northern North Korea, Cho's early life involved daily homage to portraits of the ruling Kim family. However, when he was nine, his parents fled the country as defectors, leaving him behind. He initially lived with his grandmother, but the severe famine of the mid-1990s forced her to turn him out, and he became homeless.
Living on the streets, Cho struggled to survive. "I was lucky how I survived living with all the homeless children. Some of these kids, they are stealing food, they are homeless kids," he told OMG Stores: Up Close. He described how children would snatch food from markets and be beaten while still swallowing the stolen items.
Witnessing Executions
Cho's most traumatic memory is of a public execution he was forced to watch at age 11. "All people in that village were forced to watch it," he said. "We were told to sit at the front of the crowd where three men came and shot the man tied up on the post." Each policeman fired three bullets, and Cho vividly recalls the impact on the victim's brain.
At 17, Cho attempted his first escape to China, where he saw people wearing jeans and having different hair colours — something he claims would result in execution in North Korea. He was caught and placed in a detention centre with subterranean cells before being allowed to return to his grandmother. He later fled again to China and eventually arrived in the UK in 2008.
Life in the UK and Advocacy
In the UK, Cho studied English in Bolton, earned a degree in politics from Salford University, and a master's from Liverpool University. Now in his mid-to-late 30s, he lives in Heaton Norris, Stockport, with his wife and two children. He recently ran as the Conservative candidate for the Heatons North councillor in the local elections but was unsuccessful. He serves as the Secretariat for the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea.
Ongoing Atrocities in North Korea
Cho's account comes amid a report by the Transitional Justice Working Group that documented 144 execution and death sentencing cases in North Korea, noting a surge during the Covid pandemic. The report revealed that some prisoners were executed indoors with blunt weapons like iron maces or hammers, while most were killed by firing squad. Many executions were public, and some capital punishments were for watching South Korean music and films.
