North Korea detains, expels BBC reporter

A BBC reporter in North Korea was detained, interrogated for eight hours and eventually expelled over his reporting in the run-up to a rare ruling party congress, the British broadcaster said yesterday.

Foreign reporters invited to cover specific events in North Korea are subjected to very tight restrictions on access and movement.

Numerous journalists have been prevented from returning because their previous coverage was deemed "inaccurate" or "disrespectful" -- but detaining and then expelling a reporter while still in the country is extremely rare.

The BBC journalist, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, was about to board a plane departing from Pyongyang airport with two other BBC staff on Friday when he was stopped and taken into detention, the BBC said.

He was then questioned for around eight hours, apparently over one of his reports which questioned the authenticity of a hospital his team was visiting.

"He was taken to a hotel and interrogated by the security bureau here in Pyongyang before being made to sign a statement and then released" on Saturday morning, said John Sudworth, another BBC reporter covering the congress in the North Korean capital.

Sudworth said the BBC had sought to keep the detention and expulsion order quiet out of concern for the safety of Wingfield-Hayes and two other members of his team, who had refused to leave on Friday after he was detained.

The three-person BBC team landed in Beijing from Pyongyang yesterday evening. "We are very happy to be back in Beijing," the team's producer Maria Byrne tweeted at around 7:00 pm local time.