Jeong refused to provide details on Thae Yong Ho’s route from London to South Korea, citing diplomatic issues involved for the concerned countries. On Tuesday, a Unification Ministry official confirmed that “the defectors have been released into South Korean society” and said that they “do not wish for their identities to be revealed or to be interviewed”.
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Despite growing comfortable with his posting to North Korea’s embassy in suburban London, Thae chose to leave that life behind and defect with his wife and children to South Korea, in what could be one of the highest-profile defections in years, South Korean authorities said.
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, senior lecturer in worldwide relations at King’s College London, said a diplomatic defection “could prove very valuable to South Korea, the USA and other countries”.
The number of defections by North Koreans to the South this year through July totaled 814, an annual increase of 15 percent, a Unification Ministry official told Reuters.
Thae Yong Ho and his family are under the government’s protection, a South Korean official said. To name a few, Ko Young-hwan was the first diplomat to defect from the North Korean embassy in Congo in 1991 and North Korean diplomat Hyun sung-il fled from the North Korean mission in Zambia in 1996. It did not identify the diplomat, but said he had defected early this month after “painstaking preparation”. A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office said, “It’s not a story we’re commenting on”.
And, in July, an 18-year-old student, who was in Hong Kong for an global maths contest, reportedly sought asylum in the South Korean consulate in the city. “If they broadcast (North Korea) as it is, the editors of these TV stations and newspapers will (change it)”. Hwang died in 2010. In matters of defection, “third country” signifies a country that is neither North nor South Korea. 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.
A high-profile North Korean diplomat in the United Kingdom has defected and fled overseas. But since the government had already publicly announced that these 13 North Koreans were part of a group defection, there was no reason to carry out the joint investigation for so long.
Several analysts questioned whether a defection by Thae signals discontent with the current regime.
The report noted that those who have a communist background have no experience in managing money in a capitalist country, so their money transactions, such as lending and investing, often end up causing legal battles. 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.
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Yong Ho was a counselor at the North Korean embassy, which is based in a suburban house in Ealing, and was deputy to the ambassador. By the time other embassy officials began looking for him, he was gone, the paper said. The North has typically called defectors “traitors” or has accused South Korea’s intelligence agency of kidnapping them.
