University student David Sneddon, who disappeared in China in the summer of 2004, is thought to have been smuggled to North Korea.
University student David Sneddon is thought to have been kidnapped to North Korea. He was only 24 years old when he disappeared in 2004. Currently – if he is alive – he is 43.
In the summer of 2004, after completing his first year at university, 24-year-old Sneddon goes to Beijing to get a jump start on the Chinese language course he plans to take in his senior year. He previously worked as a Mormon missionary in South Korea for two years and learned Korean.
Sneddon has a friend named George Bailey. When summer classes are over, they decide to visit some touristic places in China.
Bailey is returning to America early. Sneddon continues his journey towards the Leaping Tiger Strait, located in the Yunnan region of southern China. He walks along the walkway and eats several times at a Korean restaurant in Shangri-La. After that, no one sees him again.
His family is looking for him but can’t find anything. The State Department and Chinese officials eventually conclude that he must have slipped into the valley and fallen into the river, although his body was never found. The file is thus closed.
7 years have passed. The year is 2011. Former Pentagon officer Chuck Downs, who works on North Korea and leads the Washington-based North Korean Human Rights Committee, learns that Sneddon has disappeared. Downs worked on kidnapping-related cases (North Korea frequently kidnapped people, especially Japanese citizens, in the 1970s and 1980s). He thinks that Sneddon was kidnapped by North Korea.
The following year, a Japanese group working on kidnapping cases says it has Chinese documents proving the arrest of a 23- or 24-year-old American man in Yunnan. Then, they claim, North Korean agents took him away.
Later, the abductees’ family union in south korea (we can say “the union of the families of the kidnapped people in south korea” (what a ridiculous translation I made)), they say that they received information from pyongyang. sneddon was in north korea. He was married and had two children. And he was teaching English to Kim Jong Un.
The US Congress was investigating the incident. It is still not officially clear what happened to Sneddon at the moment.