South Korea said on Wednesday (Aug 17) that North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain had defected to Seoul, in a rare and damaging loss of diplomatic face for Pyongyang.
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Its Unification Ministry claimed Thae defected because of his disgust with the Kim Jong Un regime and worries about the future of his children.
Jeong declined to give details on the timing of Thae’s arrival or his itinerary.
Its revelation of Thae’s defection came as ties between the rivals are at one of their lowest points in decades over the North’s nuclear ambitions.
Thae’s case presents a more hard conundrum for Pyongyang. The South Korean government particularly emphasized that Thae was a “high-ranking diplomat” and that he was “sick and exhausted of the Pyongyang regime”.
The UK Foreign Office told CNN it will not be commenting on Thae’s defection.
Thae’s older brother Thae Hyong Chol is a member of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee and president of the country’s prestigious Kim Il Sung University, according to the report.
“Thae is the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat that has defected to date”, said Unification Ministry Spokesperson Jeong Joon-hee during the briefing.
Thae had been stationed in the United Kingdom but chose to defect to South Korea.
The regime’s aggressive testing of medium- and long-range missiles – as well as its nuclear testing – makes North Korea now a “practical” threat and no longer a “theoretical” threat, in the words of one U.S. official familiar with the latest USA intelligence thinking.
“The bigger picture is that while there have been fewer total defections per year under Kim Jong Un, there has been a higher number of strategically significant and political defections”, said Mr Sokeel Park of LiNK, a non-governmental organisation which works with North Korean defectors.
Three naval officers were killed by a blast at a South Korean naval base Tuesday morning and another was left wounded – although there was no suspicion of an attack by North Korea following threats of a strike from Pyongyang.
The KDI report said it is necessary to help North Koreans get proper legal services and information, and support them so they can afford good lawyers. It also said that the case shows the North’s ruling elites see no hope and the regime’s internal solidarity is weakening.
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His job also included the role of easing diplomatic tension from the worldwide community over North Korean violation of human rights, reports suggest. By the time other embassy officials began looking for him, he was gone, the paper said. The North has warned of unspecified retaliation and fired several missiles into the sea earlier this month.
