The second in command of North Korea’s embassy in London defected to South Korea with his family, officials in Seoul said on Wednesday, making him one of the most senior officials to seek asylum there from Pyongyang’s diplomatic corps.
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Thae defected due to discontent with the regime of Kim Jong Un in North Korea and for the future of his child, ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told a news conference.
A North Korean army colonel who had handled spying operations on South Korea was announced to have defected a year ago. As North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, he was supposed to improve coverage of the Kim regime in the capitalist media.
“The DPRK Embassy made belated attempts to figure out the diplomat’s whereabouts, but has failed”, it said. He led a North Korean delegation that held talks with European Union representatives over the North’s human rights situation in Brussels in 2001, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
It added he was under growing pressure to combat the diplomatic heat from the worldwide community over North Korean human rights violations. 2 In April, the South Koreans announced the arrival of a colonel from North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, the primary spy agency and the department believed to be behind the hacking of Sony Pictures in 2014 and the sinking of a South Korean naval corvette in 2010. Seoul then claimed that the restaurant workers had defected because they were under pressure to send more money back to North Korea, even as business was slumping with fewer South Korean customers.
The Foreign Office said they could not comment on the reports and could not confirm if they were trying to verify them.
Apart from the obvious and extremely damaging PR victory his defection hands to South Korea, Thae is likely to prove a crucial source of up-to-date intelligence on the state of the North Korean leadership and its policy priorities.
Reported by Dongkuk Kim for RFA’s Korea Service. In 2014, for instance, he scolded British journalists during a speech at a London bookstore for allegedly exaggerating the security level at a major event in Pyongyang, comparing it to what reporters might face if attending an event at Buckingham Palace.
Jeong said that Thae and his family had arrived in South Korea “recently”. He spoke regularly at far-left events in London, including meetings of a British communist party where he would make impassioned speeches in defence of North Korea, according to videos of the events. He added that they have “brainwashed” the working class.
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The restaurants are a source of sorely needed foreign currency for the North Korean state, which is cut off from most kinds of worldwide commerce by an increasingly tight set of economic sanctions.
