Mr Thae is the highest-ranking diplomat ever to defect to South Korea.
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And the newspaper revealed that during a talk he gave at a book shop in King’s Cross in 2014 that the diplomat held financial concerns in London which including stumping up the congestion charge.
Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee said Thae told South Korean officials that he chose to defect because of his disgust with the government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, his yearning for South Korean democracy and worries about the future of his children.
Thae’s duties while in London included keeping track of North Korean defectors and rebutting criticism of the country’s human rights record.
He moved to London with his family in 2004.
In April, 13 North Koreans working at a North Korean-operated restaurant in China defected to South Korea. Sokeel Park, the director of research at Liberty in North Korea, a California-based group that helps North Korean refugees, said that members of Thae’s family still in North Korea could face punishment.
In 2011, police in Seoul arrested a North Korean agent carrying a gun created to fire a bullet coated in poison that was disguised as a torch.
It is unclear what the consequences of Thae’s defection will have on his relatives who are still in the North.
Thursday is the 40th anniversary of a 1976 “ax murder incident” in which two US soldiers were hacked to death by North Koreans during a border area clash over USA efforts to trim a tree. Analysts generally agree there are no significant signs Kim Jong Un’s regime is weakening. The North has also said that they view the escalation of war games by the United States as a “dress rehearsal” for a full-scale invasion.
In the North’s first official response, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Mr Thae had been ordered to return home in June to be investigated for a series of crimes.
Defections by North Koreans are commonplace.
“If the people in this country, or in America, knew that there is a country in the world where there is a free education, free housing, free medical care, then they’d have second thoughts”, he had said in one speech.
Defence Minister Han Min-koo met US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus at the headquarters of the Defence Ministry in Seoul on Friday, Yonhap news agency reported.
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Seoul announced on Wednesday that Mr Thae had arrived there but refused to give further details about the defection. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Pyongyang, he also went to Denmark to continue studying, according to former North Korean diplomats now in South Korea.
