North Korea Expels BBC Journalists

SEOUL—
North Korea’s treatment of international journalists in the country is undermining the carefully constructed image of the Kim Jong Un government being presented at the party congress, now under way in Pyongyang.

North Korea expelled a team of BBC journalists Monday, apparently because officials were unhappy with their reports.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, BBC’s Tokyo correspondent, along with producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were detained Friday as they were about to leave North Korea. Wingfield-Hayes was interrogated for eight hours.

The BBC team was in North Korea ahead of the Workers Party Congress accompanying a delegation of Nobel prize laureates conducting a research trip.

The team also joined 130 invited foreign journalists to cover the beginning of North Korea’s Workers' Party Congress, the biggest political convention held in North Korea in generations.

The journalists, however, have been kept far away from thousands of party officials gathered at the event and government minders have closely managed their movements.

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