Published: April 21, 2010
SEOUL. South Korea — South Korean security officials said Wednesday they had arrested two North Korean agents who posed as defectors in a plot to assassinate the highest-ranking North Korean defector by slitting his throat.
The defector, Hwang Jang-yop, a former North Korean Workers’ Party secretary, has bitterly criticized the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, since he defected in 1997. Mr. Hwang formerly tutored Mr. Kim and helped create the country’s ruling philosophy of juche, or national self-reliance.
Mr. Hwang, now 87, lives at a secret address in South Korea under heavy police protection. He occasionally emerges to give a speech or a lecture, as he did recently in Washington and Tokyo, and his talks are typically replete with biting assessments of Mr. Kim and the North Korean regime.
North Korea has called Mr. Hwang a traitor and “human scum.” He has received several death threats, including a package sent anonymously in 2006 that contained an ax stuck to his picture and splashed with red paint. The package was sent to a South Korean radio station that carried Mr. Hwang’s speeches.
On April 5, Uriminzokkiri, a Web site run by the North Korean government, warned Mr. Hwang:
“You must not forget that traitors have always been slaughtered with knives.”
The two alleged North Korean agents, identified by officials as Kim Myong-ho and Dong Myong-gwan, arrived in South Korea in January and in February, respectively, traveling through China and Thailand pretending to be defectors, according to Oh Se-in, a deputy chief prosecutor in Seoul who oversaw the joint investigation with the National Intelligence Service, the main government spy agency.
Each year, thousands of North Koreans arrive in the South after fleeing hunger in their homeland.
Mr. Oh said the two agents, both 36, were army majors attached to the General Bureau of Surveillance, the North’s main army intelligence agency. Their mission, he said, was to track Mr. Hwang’s whereabouts and “cut his throat because he was a thorn in the eye of the North.”
“They said they were ready to commit suicide once their assassination mission was completed,” Mr. Oh said. “This case shows that North Korea is still plotting terrorism while giving lip service to exchanges and cooperation with the South.”
South Korean officials said they caught the men during routine debriefings of defectors from the North. But the formal arrests on Tuesday and the timing of their announcement were notable.
The South Korean authorities briefed local news outlets about the arrests late Tuesday, only hours after President Lee Myung-bak, a member of the conservative ruling party, delivered unusually harsh criticisms of the North Korean leaders. On Wednesday morning, the major South Korean daily newspapers carried nearly identical articles on the arrests.
Opposition politicians raised concerns that the arrests would stir fears of North Korea as a way to rally conservative votes ahead of June mayoral and gubernatorial elections. In the past, conservative governments have been accused of stoking such fears during election years. Prosecutors said their investigation had nothing to do with domestic politics.
Mr. Lee’s comments came as suspicion grows that a South Korean Navy ship, which sank near the disputed border with the North, may have been hit by a North Korean torpedo. Mr. Lee tearfully vowed this week to find the culprits, and North Korea has denied any involvement. The plot against Mr. Hwang, if confirmed, would not be the first such attempt by the North to eliminate a prominent defector. South Korea said that Lee Han-young, a nephew of a former wife of Kim Jong-il who defected to Seoul through Switzerland in 1982, was shot and killed by North Korean agents near his apartment south of Seoul in 1997. Mr. Lee was a bitter critic of the North and had revealed embarrassing details of Mr. Kim’s secretive family life.
During recent lectures and interviews in Washington and Tokyo, Mr. Hwang reportedly called Mr. Kim “a dictator 10 times worse than Kim Il-sung,” Mr. Kim’s late father and the founder of the modern North Korean state. Mr. Hwang has said the regime abused the principles of the juche philosophy to drive the North into isolation and poverty.
“They call me a traitor, but the real traitor is Kim Jong-il, who let his people starve and die,” Mr. Hwang said in an interview with the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
In a lecture in Washington on March 31, Mr. Hwang said that Mr. Kim — during a drinking party — once ordered his military to attack a South Korean guard post because he was “bored by the silence along the border,” the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reported. Such provocations were aimed at increasing Mr. Kim’s leverage in negotiations with the South, Mr. Hwang said.
The case brought fresh attention to the North’s General Bureau of Surveillance, which was created in February last year through a merger of three party and military spy agencies. The two accused spies told prosecutors that the bureau’s chief, Kim Yong-chol, personally assigned them to the assassination mission last November, throwing them a dinner party.
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