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SINUI ISLAND, South Korea — He ran the first chance he got.

The sun beat down on the shallow, sea-fed fields where Kim Seong-baek was forced to work without pay, day after 18-hour day mining the big salt crystals that blossomed in the mud around him. Half-blind and in rags, Kim grabbed another slave, and the two disabled men headed for the coast.

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Far from the glittering steel-and-glass capital of Seoul, they were now hunted men on this remote island where the enslavement of disabled salt farm workers is an open secret.

“It was a living hell,” Kim said in a recent series of interviews with The Associated Press whose details are corroborated by court records and by lawyers, police and government officials.

Lost, they wandered past asphalt-black salt fields sparkling with a patina of thin white crust. They could feel the islanders inspecting them. Everyone knew who belonged and who didn’t.

Near a grocery, the store owner’s son rounded them up and called their boss, who beat Kim with a rake and sent him back to the salt fields.