Image copyright Uriminzokkiri Image caption In the North's propaganda video the woman says she returned voluntarily 
 
 South Korean intelligence officials are investigating whether a prominent defector from the North has been kidnapped back to Pyongyang. 
 
 The woman, known as Lim Ji-hyun, fled to South Korea in 2014, where she became a popular TV personality. 
 
 However, a woman resembling her appeared in a propaganda video in the North's capital on Sunday - prompting speculation she may have been abducted. 
 
 In the video, she says she was lured away and forced to slander the North. 
 
 She says that she voluntarily returned across the border. 
 
 Ms Lim had been a popular face on South Korean television, appearing on both talk shows and reality TV programmes. 
 
 The authorities have not yet confirmed if the woman in the propaganda video is Ms Lim. However, they believe Ms Lim is back in North Korea. 
 
 The propaganda video was released on Youtube by the North Korean Uriminzokkiri website on Sunday. 
 
 In the video, the woman introduces herself by another name, Jeon Hye-Sung. 
 
 She is shown in conversation with an interviewer and Kim Man-bok, another former defector who also returned to the North. 
 
 She says she was lured to the South by the "fantasy" that she could "eat well and make lots of money" and claims that she was forced into slandering her own country. 
 
 Image copyright Uriminzokkiri Image caption In the video, she appears alongside another former defector 
 
 She describes how in the South everything was judged by money, how she was struggling to make ends meet and was asked to discredit the North on several TV shows. 
 
 She said she was now living back with her parents again after returning to the North last month. 
 
 "I felt really lonely in South Korea and I missed my parents," she said in the video. 
 
 JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reports that the defector had thanked her fans as recently as April for a birthday party, calling it "possibly the happiest birthday of my life". 
 
 Her fan club announced on Sunday it would shut. 
 
 Intelligence officials are investigating how Ms Lim might have re-entered North Korea. 
 
 Some North Korean defectors have speculated that she may have been abducted on the China-North Korean border while attempting to smuggle out family members, the Korea Times reports. 
 
 The BBC's Karen Allen in Seoul says that fake propaganda videos do circulate in North Korea but the authorities in Seoul have confirmed they are taking this seriously and are investigating her case. 
 
 Over the past decade, tens of thousands of North Koreans have defected from the authoritarian state into South Korea. 
 
 The unification ministry in Seoul told the BBC that since 2012 only 25 returned. 
 
 Some North Korean defectors have described difficulties in adapting to life in the South - many miss their families in the North, or struggle to find suitable jobs. ||||| South Korean officials agree that some of the North Koreans may have returned out of desperation after failing to adjust to life in the South. But they also suspect that some were abducted back to the North after they were lured to China. North Korean agents have tried to blackmail defectors in the South, using their relatives in the North as hostages, they said. 
 
 The returning defectors are a propaganda boon for Mr. Kim. 
 
 His government has organized news conferences in Pyongyang, where the returnees claimed that human smugglers or South Korean spy agents cheated or kidnapped them to the South. They invariably thanked Mr. Kim for giving traitors like them a second chance. The United Nations has long criticized North Korea as one of the world’s worst human rights violators. 
 
 Under Mr. Kim, the North has tightened control along the border with China, the main escape route for defectors. The number of North Korean refugees arriving in the South dropped to 1,418 last year from 2,706 in 2011, according to the Unification Ministry. It has also intensified the crackdown on South Korean movies and TV dramas smuggled from China through which North Korean defectors said they learned of life in the South. 
 
 “In the South, where money ruled, there was only physical and psychological pain waiting for people like me who had betrayed their fatherland and fled,” Ms. Lim said in an apparent warning to North Koreans who might be dreaming of leaving for the South. 
 
 Ms. Lim arrived in South Korea in 2014. 
 
 From December, she had been among scores of mostly young female North Korean defectors who have tried to build careers on cable TV talk or reality shows. They often appear in North Korean dresses and sing North Korean songs. 
 
 Speaking in their unmistakable North Korean accents, these women share often funny or tearful episodes of life in the famine-struck Stalinist state or their dangerous journeys for freedom. A show called “Love of South and North” matches North Korean women with South Korean men, placing them in a romantic situation. 
 
 These entertainment-driven programs, which often advertise “beauties from the North,” are accused of airing sensational yet unconfirmed allegations from the defectors. But they are also credited with helping South Koreans understand the lives of ordinary people in the North, a neighbor that has seldom generated interest among South Koreans despite its growing nuclear and missile threats. ||||| This is a set of web collections curated by Mark Graham using the Archive-IT service of the Internet Archive. They include web captures of the ISKME.org website as well as captures from sites hosted by IGC.org.These web captures are available to the general public.For more information about this collection please feel free to contact Mark via Send Mail
– A defector from North Korea who became a well-known TV personality in South Korea has reappeared in the North—and not everyone is convinced that her claims to be happy there after a hellish existence in the South are genuine. In a propaganda video released by Pyongyang on Sunday, Lim Ji Hyun says she was lured away from her homeland by visions of making money and returned to the North voluntarily, the BBC reports. "Every single day of my life in the South was a hell," the 26-year-old, who defected in 2014, says in the video. "When I was alone in a dark, cold room, I was heartbroken and I wept every day." Lim disappeared in April and this is the first that has been heard from her since. Lim, like dozens of other young defectors, had achieved modest success on TV, where she sometimes discussed life in the North, the New York Times reports. It's not clear how she returned to the North. South Korean officials—as well as many of her fans—suspect she might have been kidnapped by North Korea, possibly after having been lured to the country's border with China. In the video, she says she had been coerced into criticizing the North on South Korean TV—and issues a warning to people in the North thinking of defecting. "In the South, where money ruled, there was only physical and psychological pain waiting for people like me who had betrayed their fatherland and fled," she says.