PYONGYANG, North Korea—North Korea on Monday expelled a BBC journalist it had detained days earlier for allegedly “insulting the dignity” of the authoritarian country, while it continued to keep other foreign media away from the first-in-decades ruling party congress they had been invited to attend.
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was not among the scores of foreign media covering the Workers’ Party congress; he had covered an earlier trip of Nobel laureates and had been scheduled to leave Friday. Instead, he was stopped at the airport, detained and questioned.
O Ryong Il, secretary-general of the North’s National Peace Committee, said the journalist’s news coverage distorted facts and “spoke ill of the system and the leadership of the country.” He said Wingfield-Hayes wrote an apology, was being expelled Monday and would never be admitted into the country again.
The BBC says Wingfield-Hayes was detained Friday along with producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard, and that all were taken to the Pyongyang airport.
“We are very disappointed that our reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team have been deported from North Korea after the government took offence at material he had filed,” the BBC said in a statement. “Four BBC staff, who were invited to cover the Workers Party Congress, remain in North Korea and we expect them to be allowed to continue their reporting.”
More than 100 foreign journalists are in the capital for North Korea’s first party congress in 36 years, though they have been prevented from actually covering the proceedings and the more than 3,400 delegates. They’ve had to depend on reports from state media, which reports event hours later or even the next day. Officials have kept the foreign media busy with trips around Pyongyang to show them places it wants them to see.
