Pedro Paek has spoken out against the “sexist” police brutality that left him and his brother severely injured in a police officer-on-cop car chase, which the North Korean government has called “accidental.”
Paek, the president of a North Korean church in New York City, told the Post that he is not afraid of a North Korean judge who said he should have been given the death penalty.
“I told him, ‘Tell the Kim family I didn’t kill one police officer and not a thousand,’ and he said, ‘That makes it better,'” Paek said. “It turns out this is true. We won’t let them kill us. We’re going to survive with whatever we got.”
Paek, a native of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and a U.S. citizen, was severely injured in a pursuit by Manhattan Police Department officers with the intention to catch a high-speed car thief. He is currently recovering at the New York University Langone Medical Center.
Paek was arrested for felony resisting arrest, misdemeanor counts of criminal possession of stolen property and obstructing police, the Post reported Monday. Authorities are seeking three others in connection with the chase.
North Korean authorities have accused him of being part of what they call the “resistance” to the regime.
North Korea has been extremely responsive to criticism, even after the North Korean leader Kim has made threats about assassination if North Korean workers and journalists don’t get a better economic and social life under his authority, according to Paek.
“A lot of people don’t realize, no matter what [Kim] says, we’re not going to get a free market,” Paek told the Post, adding that “North Korea is a totalitarian country. The government’s got a lot of power.”
“This country is run by a totalitarian government, which is the way it always will be until they realize they can’t control everything,” he said. “There’s an important difference.”
Paek — who’s married to a South Korean woman — was in the hospital after suffering severe burns on his hands and legs. The pastor also admitted that he was in shock for about a week after the ordeal.
“I didn’t expect it to go that badly,” he said. “I expected to have just a black nail on the hand and a burning hand. But after about a week, I realized