Kim Yong Jin, North Korea’s vice premier for education, was brought before a firing squad and executed, South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesperson Jeong Joon-hee revealed Wednesday.
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The Telegraph reports North Korean dictator and petulant toddler Kim Jong Un publicly executed one of his senior military officials in July with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep in a meeting.
Executions are widely considered a political tool for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to consolidate his hold on power.
The last confirmed execution in the country was of Kim Jong-un’s own uncle, Jang Song-thaek, in December 2013.
Kim Yong Jin, second from left, a vice premier on education affairs in North Korea’s cabinet pictured with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
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.
Moon Keun-sik, a retired South Korean submarine captain said: “North Korea will be or is already in the process of building a newer, bigger submarine that may happen as early as next year”.
In July past year, South Korean officials said Kim had executed about 70 officials since taking power in late 2011.
Further unspecified crimes were allegedly uncovered by interrogators and the senior minister was executed for being “an anti-party, anti-revolutionary agitator”.
Reports of high-level executions inside North Korea, however, have a shaky relationship with the truth.
He was blamed by the South for the sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010 near the disputed sea border with the North in the Yellow Sea.
The mass-selling JoongAng Ilbo reported on Tuesday that top regime figures had been punished, but identified the education official by a different name. Some previous reports of executions and purges in the reclusive state have proven inaccurate.
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.
A year ago it was reported defence minister Hyon Yong-chol was executed by anti-aircraft gun.
South Korea has allocated 15.2 billion won (US$13.60 million) of its 2017 budget to implement a new law aimed at improving North Korea’s human rights situation, government officials said on September 1. It was Ri Chol-man who was replaced in June because he migrated over to the Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee as a department director.
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“Therefore, we are keeping close tabs on the North”, he said.
