North Korean leader’s top aide dies in vehicle crash

A senior North Korean official who was described as the country’s “top negotiator” with South Korea and a close aide to leader Kim Jong Un reportedly died this week in a auto crash.

Most recently, Kim participated in talks in August to cool tensions after an exchange of artillery fire near the two countries’ borders, and his death could mark a setback in improving North-South relations.

North Korean spy chief Kim Yang Gon gets in a vehicle upon his arrival at the transit office near the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas in Paju, north of Seoul, in this file picture taken November 29, 2007.

Kim Yang Gon, 73, died at dawn on Tuesday, the KCNA news agency said. No details of the accident were provided.

He’s not the only senior North Korean official reported to have died in a vehicle accident.

Before his death, there had been no signs that Mr Gon was engaged in any major factional feuding with other officials.

“Some of the North’s most promising party leaders have died in traffic accidents”, AFP noted. From 2000 through 2009, Kim Yang Gon appeared alongside the DPRK leader (then Kim Jong Il) an average of 5.9 times per year.

A source inside North Korea had said Choe was serving a sentence of hard labor at a mine, after being purged for a power plant malfunction near Mount Paektu.

A top North Korean official in charge of ties with South Korea and reunification was killed in a traffic accident, Pyongyang’s state media said Wednesday.

KCNA hailed Kim Yang-Gon as a faithful revolutionary of late leaders Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il and “the dearest and the most trustworthy comrade-in-arms” of current leader Kim Jong-Un.

“The Kim leadership would strive to flaunt its diplomatic feats around the party congress, for which it is expected to pursue a high-level meeting and greater economic cooperation with China and Russian Federation”, said the Korea National Diplomatic Academy’s Institute of Foreign Affairs & National Security in its forecasts. Scarlatoiu continued, “The one who appointed him head of the United Front Department was Kim Jong Il, the father of the present leader”. A surprising name on the list is Choe Ryong-hae, the former vice premier of North Korea who disappeared from public view earlier this year and was widely reported to have been executed.