The South’s Unification Ministry said the colonel, who belonged to the North’s General Reconnaissance Bureau, had arrived in South Korea a year ago, according to Yonhap, a South Korean news agency.
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The revelations Monday followed South Korea’s confirmation Friday that 13 North Koreans working for a North Korean government-run restaurant overseas had defected to the South a day earlier.
“In case the puppet group does not send them back, it will have to pay a high price for the serious consequences to be entailed by its action”, according to the statement.
North Korea however is claiming that the group, 12 females and 1 male, had been abducted by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).
If the North were, for the first time, to launch a mobile missile with these types of ranges, it would be a significant military advance and a change in the North Korean calculus for the US, military officials say.
On Monday, South Korea announced that a senior colonel who worked on North Korean intelligence gathering had also defected a year ago. An official from Seoul’s Unification ministry did not comment on their whereabouts, but said: “We can not say anything about the issue as relevant questioning [by authorities on the 13 defectors] is under way”, Yonhap reported. Prompted by media reports that the Blue House had ordered the announcement of the restaurant workers’ defection, the opposition Minjoo Party of Korea demanded that the Office of the President stop interfering in the election.
“It is worth noting that these people all had valid identity documents with them and exited the Chinese border in accordance with law”, Lu said, stressing that they were not North Koreans who had illegally crossed into China. In fact, Japanese political leaders were so much against North Korea’s unsafe and life threatening activities that they banned the entry of North Korean ships into Japanese ports and are debarring the return of people holding North Korean passports into their country.
The announcement on the defections comes as the two Koreas trade threats prompted by Pyongyang’s anger over annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that North Korea calls a rehearsal for an invasion. After the UN Security Council slapped a harsh set of sanctions on the regime last month for conducting nuclear and missile tests, North Korean restaurants in foreign nations have faced business hardships.
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“A thought came to my mind to give you this advice when I saw you standing in front of my portrait deeply engages in contemplation during your Easter prayer meeting”, the North Korean Lincoln continues.
