This is actually a legitimate concern that the ROK government should have considering North Korea’s long history of kidnapping foreign nationals:
South Korea warned on Monday there is a risk of its citizens being abducted by Pyongyang in retaliation for the defection of a dozen North Korean staff at a restaurant in China.
Twelve women working at the restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo defected to the South with their manager last month.
Seoul said they came voluntarily while the North insists they were tricked into defecting by South Korean spies who effectively “kidnapped” them.
The South’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korea affairs, said overseas missions had been advised to heighten their vigilance.
“We are closely watching out for multiple possibilities, including abduction or terrorism … by the North,” said ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee.
“We are trying to ensure the safety of our nationals,” he told reporters.
Seoul’s Hankook Ilbo daily reported Monday that Pyongyang was plotting to abduct South Koreans to trade for the 13 defectors.
“They set the target of 120 people including expats, soldiers and officials,” the newspaper said, citing an official source familiar with North Korean affairs. [AFP]
You can read more at the link, but if they were going to attempt to kidnap Koreans the easiest place to do it would be in China. Another country to be careful in would be in Japan considering how North Korea’s has kidnapped so many people before from that country as well.
For anyone wondering how the regime continues to supply itself with military components despite the UN’s shipping sanctions and China’s apparent motivation to actually enforce them, this may be the answer:
Among the North Korea-linked ships still on the U.N. blacklist, some are making fresh maneuvers that appear aimed at camouflaging their identities. The North Korean vessel the Dawnlight, which the U.S. has designated since last year, was flagged to Mongolia. In January it was renamed the Firstgleam and acquired by Sinotug Shipping Limited, a company set up just this past September in the Marshall Islands.
The U.N., having apparently missed the update, blacklisted this ship on March 2 under its old name of Dawnlight. A day later, despite a provision calling for member states to deflag North Korean ships, the Firstgleam was reflagged to Tanzania, according to Lloyds. As of this week, the ship, which the U.N. and U.S.-sanctions lists still refer to as the Mongolia-flagged Dawnlight, was signaling a position close to Japan. [Wall Street Journal]
One Free Korea has a really good read over at his site on this topic. It seems to me that the shipping sanctions are working to an extent, but they need to be tightened to ensure military components are not getting into North Korea to assist their missile and nuclear programs.
Over the years I have had a number of technical problems keeping the site up, but I don’t think they were caused by the North Koreans though stories like this one make me wonder:
A prominent U.S. human rights activist claimed Friday that North Korea hacked into his computer last week which contained a document on cooperation between North Korea and Syria.
Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director at the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said that when he woke up at a hotel during his recent visit to Latin America, he found that his computer had been “compromised and remotely accessed.”
The Washington-based non-governmental organization has focused on shedding light on North Korea’s human rights violations and improving the North’s rights records.
“Only one document was opened. That document contains some material that I had received from Syrian human rights defenders regarding Syria-North Korea cooperation,” Scarlatoiu told Yonhap News Agency on the sidelines of a forum in Seoul.
“There is only one suspect here,” he said, referring to North Korea.
Scarlatoiu said that cyber security experts whom he has contacted said that “most likely the attack came from North Korea,” though he has no hard evidence for that. His claim has yet to be independently verified. [Korea Times]
I wonder how much of North Korea’s submarine launched ballistic missile technology is a charade to make the outside world think they have advanced their technology more than they really have?:
North Korea’s new sea-launched, nuclear-capable ballistic missile and the submarine that fires it are both technologically backward, unreliable, and wickedly unsafe for the unfortunate souls tasked with operating them.In short, Pyongyang’s new undersea nuke—which the hermit regime test-launched off the country’s eastern coast on April 23—is a dud by any normal standard.
But that doesn’t matter, because normal standards of atomic safety and effectiveness don’t apply to North Korea’s totalitarian regime. Pyongyang has nuclear weapons plus at least one submarine that, however unreliably, can launch them. That rudimentary atomic capability is probably all the regime needs to deter the rest of the world… while also bending the international system’s rules for its own benefit. (……)
The submarine in question, apparently built in secrecy some time before 2010, appears to be a modified version of a Yugoslavian sub design from the mid-1970s.Approximately 220 feet long and displacing around 1,500 tons of water, the North Korean vessel is ancient and tiny compared to the latest U.S. and Russian ballistic-missile submarines, which can stretch 500 feet or more from bow to stern and displace 18,000 tons of water.
And the North Korean Pongdae-class sub—named for the boiler plant that serves as the official cover for the shipyard that reportedly built the vessel—is surely no less accident-prone than Pyongyang’s other submarines, one of which went missing and presumably sank while on patrol in early March.“I certainly wouldn’t want to be on a North Korean submarine,” Eric Wertheim, an independent U.S. naval analyst and author of Combat Fleets of the World, told The Daily Beast. “They’re not the safest of underwater platforms.” [The Daily Beast]
Here is another example of the strategic messaging the North Koreans are sending towards the ROK that they can target and destroy Seoul:
Satellite imagery of a replica of the South Korean presidential office Cheong Wa Dae that North Korea has set up in preparations for a large-scale artillery assault exercise.
North Korea is preparing to launch a large-scale artillery assault drill on a replica of the South Korean presidential office Cheong Wa Dae in a move to fan cross-border tensions in the runup to a rare congress of its ruling party, the military here said Wednesday.
About 30 artillery pieces have been brought to a training range just outside of Pyongyang where a replica of Cheong Wa Dae, about half its actual size, was set up in early April, a Joint Chiefs of Staff official said.
The types of artillery cannot be identified because they are covered up, he said, citing satellite surveillance results.
“The North is likely to conduct an actual exercise in the near future,” according to the official.
The move is intended to instill animosity among North Koreans toward Seoul’s leadership and to tighten internal unity ahead of the congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea set to start on May 6, he noted.
In a string of warlike rhetoric, the North has repeatedly threatened to launch strikes on the presidential office and South Korean state agencies. [Korea Times]
I would not want to be part of the North Korean engineer team responsible for the production of the Musudan right now. It is pretty embarrassing for the Kim regime that three of these Musudans have now failed right after launch:
North Korea fired off a second Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) after it failed in its first attempt on Thursday, but this latest launch also seems to have ended in failure, South Korea’s military said.
“North Korea fired off what appears to be another Musudan missile at about 7:26 p.m. in Wonsan, Kangwon Province, but this also ended in failure,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
Earlier in the day, the North launched the same type of missile from the vicinity of Wonsan but it is known to have crashed a few seconds later.
The second attempt marks the third time that Pyongyang test fired its intermediate-range ballistic missile in less than two weeks. The first time it tested the missile was on April 15, but that launch ended in what experts called a catastrophic failure. [Yonhap]
