Lee and Ling write of N. Korean captivity

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- The two U.S. journalists imprisoned for months in North Korea before being freed in August said they never intended to cross the North Korea-China border.

"We didn't spend more than a minute on North Korean soil before turning back, but it is a minute we deeply regret," Current TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee wrote in a letter published in the Los Angeles Times Wednesday.

The reporters were working on a story about human trafficking. They were arrested at the North Korea-China border in March, detained, interrogated, then tried, convicted and sentenced to 12 years hard labor for trespassing and "hostile acts." They were released in August following a private humanitarian trip to the reclusive communist country by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

A guide brought the pair to the frozen Tumen River along the border to document a well-known trafficking route, Lee and Ling wrote. They followed him onto the ice, felt uneasy, then turned back.

"To this day, we still don't know if we were lured into a trap," they wrote. "But it was ultimately our decision to follow him, and we continue to pay for that decision today with dark memories of our captivity."

Lee and Ling said they were "firmly back inside China" when North Korean soldiers apprehended them. The guide and a Current TV producer escaped.

"We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers," they wrote.

Instead of focusing on their plight, Lee and Ling said, "we would rather redirect this interest to the story we went to report on, a story about despairing North Korean defectors who flee to China only to find themselves living a different kind of horror."