2 North Korean Doctors Dead After Wives Inject Them

The wives are apparently doctors, too
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 5, 2016 11:00 AM CST
2 North Korean Doctors Dead After Wives Inject Them
Visitors watch the North side as they visit Imjingak, near the border village of the Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, on Jan.1, 2016.   (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Strange deaths involving North Koreans keep getting stranger—only this time the incident occurred in Cambodia. Two doctors, both in their 50s and working in Phnom Penh, got so drunk last weekend that their wives, who are also both doctors, decided to inject them with some kind of "medicine and serum" to ostensibly counteract the deleterious effects of the alcohol. Both men then died of apparent heart attacks, reports the Phnom Penh Post. "After arriving home, we checked their conditions, and their temperature had reached [104 degrees Fahrenheit], and their heartbeat was abnormal and their pulses abnormally weak," one wife said. An hour later they died, yet their deaths were not reported for several more hours. One of the doctors had scratch marks on his chest and stomach.

"Even by the standards of news about North Korea, this story is bizarre," observes the Washington Post, which points out several other notably mysterious tales of North Koreans. First, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's uncle was shot. Then his former girlfriend, a singer, was reported executed and then reappeared. And then Kim Yang Gon, a top liaison with South Korea, was killed in an apparent car accident in a country with few cars and a story with fewer details. And while police in this latest case were initially suspicious when they arrived at the clinic that also served as the doctors' home in Cambodia, where a dozen other North Koreans were present, the police chief says autopsy reports show the doctors did indeed die of heart attacks. The case has been closed. (Still unexplained: "Ghost ships" believed to be from North Korea turning up near Japan.)

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