Seoul’s unification ministry has dismissed a local news report that claimed nearly 800 North Korean defectors left South Korea to settle in a third country in recent years, asserting that the actual number is a small fraction of that.

In a statement on Monday, ministry spokesperson Lee Jong-joo said that only 20 defectors who originally settled in South Korea emigrated to another country from 2016 to 2020. The rebuttal comes after a defector’s dramatic return to North Korea across the inter-Korean border on Jan. 1 drew renewed attention to the difficult lives of many defectors in the South.