While speaking with the Toronto Star, Lee Young-guk, 57, the North Korean regime tried to kidnap him while living in South Korea, and told the publication through an interpreter, “If Canada returns me there, I’m a dead man.”

According to the Star, Lee first fled from North Korea in 2000 and traveled to the South Korean capital of Seoul. Six years later, he arrived in Toronto, along with his wife and two kids, seeking asylum.

Lee told the Star that he started working as Kim’s bodyguard in 1978, and he became a military adviser from 1988 to 1991, after spending 10 years as the Kim’s protector. The Star reported that Lee stated he tried to escape the socialist state on two occasions but was captured the first time and sent to a labor camp for five years.

“In the Yodok concentration camp, in order to survive, to get more food, I volunteered to carry and bury deceased inmates in the mountains,” Lee told the Star. “People would ask each other, that they’re buried with a piece of note in a medicine bottle containing their personal identity details. I personally buried over 300 bodies.”

Despite receiving threats and persecution while living in South Korea, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board denied his asylum claim in a decision released on July 31, stating that he lacked credibility after trying to remove himself from the North Korean regime and downplaying his connection to Kim as his military adviser.

Brenda Lloyd, an asylum adjudicator who denied Lee’s request, stated that the board found “the lack of documentation surprising, given his allegations this is why he is being targeted and also due to the two books he wrote,” one of which was I Was Kim Jong Il’s Bodyguard, where he claimed that he advocated for human rights for North Korean citizens while living in South Korea.

According to the Star, Lloyd questioned Lee’s claims that he was nearly kidnapped on two separate occasions while living in South Korea, in 2004 and 2007, since he reported them in 2014, which is past the five-year statutory time limit for prosecution.

“Waiting for years after the incidents to file a complaint lacks credibility. If he felt threatened for kidnapping or threats, it is not credible he would delay for so many years,” Lloyd said in her decision, according to the Star, adding that there is “no serious possibility” Lee would be “persecuted or would be subjected, on a balance of probabilities, to a danger of torture or to a risk to life or a risk of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment in South Korea.”

While speaking with the Star on Tuesday, Lee said he was disappointed in the board’s decision, stating that “in a dictatorial system, if you don’t follow what the government tells you to do, your whole family and you get punished and destroyed,” and adding that he would like to appeal the decision.

In an email sent to Newsweek, Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, stated that, “Lee Young-guk survived the deadly political prison camps of North Korea so it is astonishing that Canada somehow doesn’t believe his narrative is credible.

“South Korean President Moon Jae-in has bent over backwards to try to assuage the North Korean government in his meandering efforts to achieve peace, and this has included cracking down on North Korean defectors who have settled in the South,” the email added. “So Lee Young-guk has legitimate concerns about how Seoul will treat him on return, especially if North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un demands he be returned. Canada should not consider sending Lee Young-guk anywhere without getting concrete guarantees on paper that under no circumstances can he ever be sent back to North Korea.”

Newsweek reached out to Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.