Well now we apparently know why the Hyundai worker was held hostage in North Korea:

A Hyundai Asan Corp. worker who returned to Seoul after more than four months of captivity in North Korea was originally detained after making remarks about the country’s leader and its regime, his brother insisted Friday, according to Yonhap News.Little information has been available about the circumstances leading to the detention of Yu Seong-jin, 44, except for vague accounts provided by North Korea to the South Korean government.

The North claimed Yu had criticized the North’s political system and tried to entice a local woman to defect to South Korea.

His elder brother, Yu Seong-gwon, said the unmarried Hyundai Asan engineer was taken into custody for talking about the North Korean leader and his family, including his third and youngest son Jong-un, reportedly the heir-apparent. Such talk is highly taboo in the communist state.

“Talking about Kim Jong-il is forbidden in North Korea, but my brother says he talked about Kim Jong-il, his sister and Kim Jong-un. He criticized them before the people who worked with him,” the elder Yu said over the telephone.

Yu, who worked as a boiler mechanic at an inter-Korean industrial park in North Korea’s border town of Kaesong, was reunited with his family on Thursday after 137 days of incommunicado detention in the North. His release came days after Hyun Jung-eun, chairwoman of Hyundai Asan’s parent, Hyundai Group, traveled to Pyongyang to press for his case. Days earlier, North Korea had pardoned two detained American journalists during a visit by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.  [Korea Herald]

The North Koreans were looking for an excuse to hold someone hostage and Yu gave them the excuse to do so.  When the Kaesong Complex was first built I and probably many others were thinking when will the North Koreans take their first hostage from this facility to get concessions from the South Koreans?  That is why I can’t blame Yu for what happened, this is the fault of Hyundai and the South Korean government for making this complex in the first place.