Claims that an “accidental” female North Korean defector wishes to return to her homeland have been met with mixed reactions from human rights groups and Pyongyang-watchers, conversations with NK News revealed Thursday.

Video messages exchanged between Kim Ryon Hui – a defector who says she mistakenly went to South Korea in 2011 – and family in the North were exchanged in dramatic scenes revealed by American TV network CNN on Thursday.

“To my wife in South Korea, don’t forget here you have parents, a husband and daughter and a socialist nation,” a sobbing husband in Pyongyang told his wife, in a video message that CNN taped her subsequently watching in South Korea.

Her