AFTER desperately fleeing across a frozen river to escape North Korea 25 years ago, Kim Kyu-li was able to reinvent her life and built her own catering business in London.
Yet on the other side of the world, Kyu-li's sister, Cheol-ok, is languishing in a North Korean prison, facing torture and starvation under Kim Jong Un's tyrannical rule.
Kyu-li, 47, told The Sun through tears how she is desperately trying to find her sister disappeared by the cruel regime and fears time could be running out.
She said: "I don't know what's happening inside the prison camp she is in.
"I have lost all family, I only have my sisters left."
Victims locked away in Kim Jong-un's prisons are brutally punished by guards with rape, forced abortions, and even extrajudicial executions.
Families and prisoners are not told their location or even how long they will have to endure the horrifying camps for - a practice known as enforced disappearance.
Kyu-li doesn't know for fact that Cheol-ok is still alive, but says she believes in her heart that her sister would never give up because she is "strong".
It's the latest twist in a heartbreaking saga that saw the sisters separated for 20 years after they fled North Korea separately in the late 1990s and became illegal immigrants in China.
In 2007, Kyu-li staged another daring escape from China, and found freedom and safety in Britain - now leading a wildly different life from her younger sibling.
Just days after escaping North Korea, Cheol-ok was sold for marriage to a man 30 years her senior.
She had his baby at just 16 years old and was condemned to a life of poverty in rural China.
The pair lost contact for 20 years despite Kyu-li constantly searching for her sister in North Korean defector communities online.
They were finally able to reunite during the Covid pandemic after finding each other on social media.
Kyu-li encouraged her sister to flee and move to Britain to live the same safe and prosperous life she had.
But as she made her dash from China, Cheol-ok was caught by cops, and was deported back to North Korea in 2023.
The family only know about the arrest after Cheol-ok begged a Chinese prison guard to let her use his phone in order to make a final call.
They have not heard from her since with North Korea's policy of 'enforced disappearance' meaning officials refuse to pass on any information about the imprisoned.
Heartbroken Kyu-li says the family has no idea where exactly Cheol-ok is being held inside North Korea, or how long she will be there for.
North Korea has repeatedly denied the "hellish" camps exist.
But satellite photographs reveal they can hold thousands of people and are even visible from space, while stories from survivors have detailed the horrific conditions inside.
Witnesses have told how inmates are forced to live on just 80g of corn a day, topping up their miserly rations with insets, rodents or animal feed.
The skeletal prisoners are also subject to vicious beatings, forced labour and rape.
Amnesty International say Kim Jong-un has even been pouring more resources into two notorious political prison camps, known as kwanliso, including building an expanded crematorium to dispose of the bodies of those who have died at the hands of the regime.
The first time Kim's family escaped North Korea was when the country went through a deep famine in the 1990s.
The tyrannical Kim dynasty turned on its people and impoverished them to keep itself afloat.
Kyu-li's family were smallholding farmers and cronies of the rulers stole most of the food they grew to feed the country's rich elites.
She says they were only left with two months worth of food each year - condemning them to starvation.
Tragically, Kyu-li's mother died in 1995 and her father soon after became too sick to work.
That left the responsibility of running the farm on Kyu-li's shoulders - with her brother and older sister conscripted into to the army.
She said: "This was not my farm. We were working there - but in the end there was nothing left for us."
Kyu-li began stealing potatoes, tomatoes, and chillies from her own farm and then going into the city at night to sell them.
One night, while the then 18-year-old was standing outside in the cold winter night crying, she noticed how bright the lights across the Yalu River were in China.
Her family lived close to the border and Kyu-li imagined what life would be like fleeing out of the darkness.
She remembers saying to herself: "'I will die in North Korea if I live like this'."
So, one night, Kyu-li waited for a border guard to finish watching the river as he enjoyed a cigarette and then return to the inside of his hut.
Kyu-li then then sprinted across the frozen waterway demarcating the two countries desperately hoping to dodge the distracted guard.
In the 1990s, the North Korean-China border was much more porous than it is today under Kim's hardliner regime.
On the other side, Kyu-li met Koreans who took her in and gave her food and said they would buy the food she was selling.
For the next three winters, Kyu-li would cross the border several times to sell corn and other produce she could find or steal in China.
Eventually, she fled North Korea for good with the help of a broker who helped her to start a life in China.
She left her older sister and brother behind who were conscripted into the military and her younger sister, who was too young to move to China.
With no money or qualifications, Kyu-li was sold by her broker to a Korean-Chinese man for marriage.
But, after a year, he moved back to his home in South Korea for work - abandoning Kyu-li.
Kyu-li continued to live in China for seven years and worked in a Korean restaurant.
Alone, Kyu-li was able to earn money and finally have some control over her own life.
Brave Kyu-li helped to get her siblings out of the country, including an older sister who had been conscripted into the army. That sister is now believed to be in South Korea, and Kyu-li does not want her name revealed for fear it will also place her in grave danger.
Cheol-ok escaped to China in 2003 aged just 14 - but was sold to a Chinese man three times her age for marriage within days.
Kyu-li pleaded with the broker who had facilitated Cheol-ok's escape to tell her where she was.
"But every time he hung up, I couldn't talk anymore with him," she said.
But the sisters sadly lost contact for the next 19 years with no way to find each other hiding among China's huge population.
The pair were illegal immigrants and faced deportation back to North Korea if Chinese authorities found them.
They had no ID documents and lived without social services so as to stay out of sight from cops.
Some 20 years later, Kyu-li fears her younger sister will be put into a similarly brutal prison.
Kyu-li and Cheol-ok reconnected through social media in 2022 after they had joined the same North Korean defector group on Chinese social media app WeChat.
Kyu-li says she felt like she had "caught all the words, I just know everything is fine, everything is done."
She said: "She's [Cheol-ok] like a Chinese person, because she can't speak Korean, she just speaks Chinese like a Chinese person."
Kyu-li's older sister was sent to a death camp in 2005 after she was snatched by cops inside North Korea.
The defector has asked The Sun don't reveal her name as she is worried about her safety.
Kyu-li's sister once saw inmates beat a pregnant woman to death after guards forced the prisoners to each beat her once.
There were 30 people crammed into one tiny cell with inmates forced to sleep sitting up with their knees bent.
Guards would hit the inmates if they ever talked.
Dozens would die each day from execution, starvation, and torture and the prisoners were forced to dispose of the bodies.
Kyu-li's sister was put in prison and never told how long she was going to be there for.
It took five months for Kyu-li's aunt, who was still inside the country, to find which prison the sister was sent to.
Then, after another six more months, they were able to get her out of the country again.
Kyu-li's uncle was wealthy and powerful in North Korean society and Kyu-li's aunt was able to use her influence to rescue her niece.
Soon after the pair reunited, Cheol-ok caught Covid-19 and got badly sick with no access to healthcare.
When Cheol-ok survived, Kyu-li told her sister now was the time to flee China and get to the West where she could live in safety.
Cheol-ok found a broker with a group of other Koreans who were also about to escape.
They made a brave dash for freedom in 2023, but were intercepted by Chinese police and disappeared.
Cheol-ok managed to alert her family to her impending deportation after she managed to phone her daughter with a prison guard's cellphone.
They have not heard from her since.
Enforced disappearance is the arrest or detention of a person followed by the refusal to acknowledge that and their whereabouts.
A new report by the Transitional JusticeWorking Group (TJWG) says Kim Jong-un is "ultimately responsible" for countless enforced disappearances.
The dictator uses agencies like the Ministry for State Security to terrorise his population with the method and keep him and his family in power.
TJWG identified 113 victims of enforced disappearance through interviews with North Korean escapees.
Without knowledge of their location or why they have been detained a family's job of trying to find their loved one is that much harder.
Enforced disappearances also makes it easier for the state to torture its prisoners as lawyers, activists, or family can't get to them.
The method is used by regimes to spread terror in their populations.
Syria's overthrown dictator Bashar al-Assad also practised the horror crime.
The TJWG were only able to interview and identify a small number of people as finding escapees who are willing to talk is extremely difficult.
But, what they did find is that North Koreans are being disappeared from their own country as well as China, like Cheol-ok, Russia, and Vietnam.
Age also does not seem to be a barrier for the dictator's thugs, with children and the elderly also disappeared.
North Korea, the report finds, practices the crime of enforced disappearance for overt anti-regime activities and for any act that shows political opposition.
That gives authorities a wide berth to lock people up.
One victim of disappearance told investigators for the report: “They don’t tell you [why you are being taken away].
"When [the MSS agents] came to my house and told me to come with them because they had something to ask me, I knew something was wrong.
"When I asked them why, they said, ‘We need to check something, so just come with us.’
"Once I was at [the MSS] and started talking, they told me to hand over the phone.
"When I denied owning it, they started to hit me... however much they want.”
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