North Korea has executed a top education official and banished two other officials to rural areas for re-education, South Korean officials said Wednesday.
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Kim Yong Jin was killed by a firing squad in July as “an anti-party, anti-revolutionary agitator”, added an official at the ministry, who declined to be named.
It seems another senior official, Ri Yong-jin, of the Education Ministry, suffered the same fate after falling asleep.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un seems to be trying to tighten his grip on power.
Kim Yong-Jin, pictured second from the left, was executed by firing squad in July.. The state security ministry questioned Mr. Kim, rather intensely, which was then followed by execution.
The report has not been independently verified as of Tuesday; no announcement has been made by North Korea’s state KCNA news agency.
North Korea has executed Kim Yong-Jin, its Vice Premier for Education, and rebuked two high-ranking officials. Yonhap also reported that Kim Yong Chol, the United Front Department head, had spent a month in a re-education camp for abuse of power and that he had been released in mid-August.
David Kang, a professor of worldwide relations at the University of Southern California, told CNN: “It is another way for Kim Jong Un to show he is in power”. Some previous reports of executions and purges in the reclusive state have proven inaccurate.
In 2015, an anti-aircraft gun was allegedly used to execute defense minister Hyon Yong-chol, who had been accused of treason, according to CNN.
“The trouble for Kim began after he was seen sitting with bad attitude during a meeting of the People’s Supreme Assembly”.
The North Korean regime is especially paranoid in recent weeks after a senior offiicial at the London embassy defected to South Korea along with his wife and children.
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According to the reports that said by the officials to media, “Kim Yong-Jin was criticized for his very bad sitting posture on the platform during an assembly of parliament of North Korea and then went through a questioning session that exposed others”.
