Choe Ryong Hae believed sent to ‘re-education’ farm

A top North Korean official sent condolences to Mali’s president last Friday, after a terror attack at a major hotel in Bamako left at least 21 people dead.

Seoul’s spy agency says North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is believed to have demoted one of his top associates and sent him to a rural collective farm.

It is understood that Choe Ryong Hae may have defied Kim Jong-un, who over the past 18 months has brutally executed many of his high-ranking military and political chiefs.

The intelligence agency attributes Choe’s ouster to a disagreement with Kim, who is pressing ahead with youth-focused policies, and Choe, who heads the youth organization.

Communist party secretary Choe Ryong-hae botched a major hydroelectric power plant project earlier this year during which a water tunnel had collapsed during construction, which is a big deal considering that the country already relies on dwindling resources.

His whereabouts have been under intense media speculation since he was found to have been omitted from a list of a committee that prepared the state funeral of a North Korean military marshal in early November.

South Korean newspaper Kookje Shinmun reported that Kim also denounced acts of terror against civilian populations.

The NIS told lawmakers that Kim is eventually expected to rehabilitee Choe, but didn’t say when.

The drill was carried out around front-line islands in the Yellow Sea to mark the anniversary of North Korea’s deadly shelling of one of them five years ago, the South’s defense ministry said.

China’s efforts to renew ties with Pyongyang come at a time when relations between the two nuclear-armed states are suffering, largely because of the Kim regime, which began to downgrade ties at the end of 2013 with the execution of Kim’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek. Citing a report by a local newspaper in Tanzania published on February 21, the NIS said North Korea was caught trading sexual enhancer products, or aphrodisiacs, that contained mercury 185 times higher than global standards.