It appears to me that the Kim regime is using this likely manufactured story as a way to take shots at both the ROK and China as nations that cannot be trusted:
A source in North Korea told Japan press that North Korean soldiers crossed the border with China at Tumen to arrest two suspects planning to assassinate Kim Jong Un. Pictured: A bulldozer and truck cross a bridge into Namyang, North Korea, from Tumen, China. File photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
At least two suspects who attempted to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were arrested, according to unconfirmed reports in the country.
The suspects had been reportedly arrested at the China border near the Tumen River as they were preparing a hit on Kim in the city of Hoeryong in North Hamgyong Province, Radio Free Asia reported Thursday.
A source in the North who spoke to Japanese news service Asia Press on the condition of anonymity said he had heard the “terrorists” had not yet crossed the Tumen, which separates North Korea from China, when North Korean border guards crossed the border to arrest them.
The source went on to say the suspects were transferred to the State Security Department, and that the border guards were given rewards – including a chance to become members of the Korean Workers’ Party.
One of the suspects is allegedly a North Korean defector from the South, but the other one or more were Chinese nationals.
Japanese journalist Jiro Ishimaru, founder of Asia Press, said it is likely a rumor that was manufactured by the state to bolster support for the party ahead of its Seventh Congress in May. [UPI via reader tip]
This is actually pretty amazing that an entire restaurant staff would defect because the selection process for the job is relatively stringent so it isn’t like the workers are coming from desperately poor families in North Korea. It is also pretty impressive that the entire staff was able to coordinate with each other to do this without fear of one of them informing on them back to regime minders:
Thirteen North Koreans working in a state-run restaurant outside the country have defected to South Korea, a government official in Seoul said Friday.
The South Korean government estimates that Pyongyang rakes in around $10 million every year from some 130 restaurants it operates — with mostly North Korean staff — in 12 countries, including neighbouring China.
Last month, while unveiling a series of unilateral sanctions on Pyongyang over its January nuclear test, Seoul had urged South Korean citizens overseas to boycott any such establishments, saying their profits funded the North’s nuclear weapons programme.
The defectors, one male manager and a dozen women, arrived in the South on Thursday, Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee told reporters.
He declined to identify the country where the restaurant they had been working in was located.
There have been defections by individual restaurant workers in the past, but this is the first time so many staff from one restaurant have defected en masse.
Jeong quoted one of the defectors as saying that everyone had been “on the same page” about escaping to South Korea. [AFP]
A group of North Korean defectors prepares to release balloons containing leaflets critical of the North Korean regime in Paju, near the inter-Korean border, on April 6, 2016. The balloons were released despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that the government can keep activists from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border, citing the safety of residents there. (Yonhap)
The ROK really cannot complain about this considering how private organizations continue to send propaganda leaflets and CDs via balloon into North Korea. The nuisance of dealing with the litter caused by this propaganda war is worth it in my opinion because of the effect the propaganda has within North Korea:
North Korea has sent leaflets and compact discs criticizing President Park Geun-hye and the ruling Saenuri Party to South Korea, police said Wednesday, the latest move in its propaganda campaign.
Police retrieved some 20,000 leaflets and 40 CDs from Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, just northwest of Seoul, at around 5 a.m.
Earlier in the day, dozens of leaflets criticizing South Korea’s military and its joint exercise with the United States were found in central Seoul at around midnight, according to police.
Later on Wednesday, a group of defectors in South Korea sent 300,000 leaflets with messages criticizing the communist regime and 4,000 sheets of local newspapers over the border from Paju, Gyeonggi Province.
The same group had sent another 300,000 leaflets to the North last month. [Yonhap]
This incident makes me wonder if there was some poor translation done by somebody within the South Korean governmental bureaucracy that makes these decisions because I don’t see how the blog North Korea Tech violates the country’s National Security Law?:
A British journalist who runs a website that documents North Korean technology issues said Tuesday that he’ll appeal a decision by South Korean authorities to block his site for allegedly violating the country’s National Security Law.
Martyn Williams, whose North Korea Tech website has been blocked for almost two weeks, said the site does not violate the security law, which bans praising, sympathizing or cooperating with North Korea. The website “doesn’t seek to glorify or support North Korea,” he said in an email.
Williams, who is based in San Francisco, has written about issues ranging from cellphone usage in North Korea and its satellite technology, to a little-known computer operating system developed by North Koreans. He said much of the content on his website is based on announcements made by the North and South Korean governments and reports in the media.
The South’s Korea Communications Standards Commission confirmed Tuesday that it decided on March 24 to block the site because it allegedly violated the security law. The censorship body blocks websites deemed illegal or harmful to society, such as pornography, gambling and North Korea’s official outlets. [Associated Press via reader tip]
Here is the latest intelligence assessment provided by 38 North using commercial satellite data on when they think North Korea will conduct another nuclear test:
Activities detected at North Korea’s main nuclear complex in Yongbyon are increasing speculation that Pyongyang is preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test.
Citing satellite images showing exhaust plumes that were uploaded Monday by 38 North ― a U.S. website on North Korea issues ― analysts here said Tuesday that Pyongyang may be taking preparatory steps for another nuclear test.
The analysts predict that the fifth test could be conducted on the occasion of the seventh Workers’ Party Congress, a rare congressional meeting scheduled to take place in May for the first time since 1980.
“North Korean leader Kim Jong-un apparently wants to run a big event to publicize his leadership at the Workers’ Party Congress,” said An Chan-il, head of the World Institute for North Korea Studies. “And it’s possible North Korea could test a nuclear bomb using one of the three materials ― plutonium, uranium or hydrogen.” [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link or over at 38 North.
North Korea is continuing with their propaganda campaign and this time they have released a video depicting rockets landing into Seoul and destroying such iconic buildings as the Blue House, the Ministry of Defense and the War Memorial. They also have a scene of rockets landing and destroying a 2nd Infantry Division camp, but it is hard to tell which one it is:
North Korea released a video Monday that depicts an attack on South Korean government buildings, including the presidential Blue House. The 88-second video is called “if the ultimatum goes unanswered” and ends with the words “everything will turn into ashes.” Over the past several weeks, the country has repeatedly issued threats against Seoul and Washington, largely in response to annual joint military exercises that began in early March. The Korean People’s Army has issued an “ultimatum” demanding South Korean President Park Geun-Hye apologize for the larger-than-usual war games, which include an operation built to “decapitate” Pyongyang’s leadership, should a full-scale conflict arise. A little more than a week ago, the website released a video showing a nuclear attack on the United States. [The Daily Beast]
When I first heard about the leak of the “Panama Papers” I wonder if North Korea was using these off shore companies to launder money like many other politically connected individuals around the world were doing? Sure enough it has now been confirmed that North Korea has been linked to the Panama Papers:
The Panama legal firm at the heart of a massive data leak kept clients who were subject to international sanctions, documents show.
Mossack Fonseca worked with 33 individuals or companies who have been placed under sanctions by the US Treasury, including companies based in Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.
One had links to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
The information comes from the leak of 11m of the company’s internal files.
Mossack Fonseca registers companies as offshore entities operated under its own name. This meant the identities of the real owners were hard to trace because they were kept out of public documents.
Some of the businesses were registered before international sanctions were imposed. But in several cases Mossack Fonseca continued to act as a proxy for them after they were blacklisted.
DCB Finance was established in 2006, with its owners and directors based in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang. It was later put under sanctions by the US Treasury for raising funds for the North Korean regime and being linked to a bank helping to fund the regime’s nuclear weapons programme.
The leaked files reveal the owners of DCB Finance were a North Korean official, Kim Chol Sam and Nigel Cowie, a British banker who was also CEO of the sanctioned Daedong Credit Bank.
Mossack Fonseca appears to have overlooked that the owners and directors of the company were based in Pyongyang until it was contacted by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) authorities in 2010, inquiring about another company Mossack Fonseca had set up with directors in North Korea.
Mossack Fonseca resigned as agents for DCB Finance in September 2010. [BBC]
You can read much more at the link, It will be interesting to see what else comes out about the document leak involving North Korea.
With prices to pay brokers to assist people defecting from North Korea skyrocketing due to the border crackdown during the Kim Jong-un era; it only makes sense that defector families already in South Korea would have to pool their meager resources to get the rest of their family members out:
First came Kim Yong-shil, in 2006. Then her husband, her two grown daughters, her teenaged son. Two years later, out came her mother, then one brother, then in 2012, the other.
One by one over the past decade, the members of this family have escaped from North Korea, the ones who made it out first earning money and meeting brokers so they could bring out the others.
This process — called “chain defection” — is almost the only way to escape from North Korea now, as security along the border has tightened dramatically since Kim Jong Un took control of the state four years ago.
In the past 20 years, some 29,000 North Koreans have fled hunger and repression at home by escaping across the river that forms the country’s border with China. The flow of refugees had been tracking steadily upward until plummeting during Kim’s first year in power. By last year, fewer than 1,300 people had escaped, less than half of the peak recorded in 2009. [Washington Post]
