Korea calls defected diplomat ‘criminal’

The KCNA news agency said British officials had been informed of his alleged crimes.

Aug 20, 2016- North Korea has branded a UK-based diplomat who defected to South Korea as “human scum”.

Thae Yong Ho, North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain, had embezzled huge sums of money, raped a minor, and spied for South Korea, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in the first public response to the defection.

It accused the United Kingdom of “handing over the fugitives without passports to the South Korean puppets and neglecting its duty to protect diplomats living in its own country”.

The ministry said Thae chose to defect because of his disgust with the Kim Jong-Un regime, his yearning for South Korean democracy and concerns about his children’s future, Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, reported.

He is one of the highest ranking diplomats ever to defect to South Korea, and the move handed Seoul a major propaganda coup at a time of rising tension on the divided Korean peninsula.

Please Wait while comments are loading.

Officials in the South revealed Mr Thae arrived in the country on Wednesday but refused to give any further details.

Sokeel Park, the director of research at Liberty in North Korea, an organization that assists North Korean refugees, told CNN that family members of the diplomat that remained behind in North Korea will likely face harsh punishment.

But KCNA said Saturday Thae fled “for fear of legal punishment for his crimes”, adding that the South had brought the “fugitive” to Seoul to use him for its anti-Pyongyang smear campaign. Pyongyang often accuses the South of deceiving or paying its citizens to defect, or claims that they have simply been kidnapped.

According to preliminary information by the Russian law enforcement, he initially flew from St. Petersburg to Minsk and from there, to Ukraine before leaving for South Korea.

North and South Korea are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. Later in April, South Korea also revealed that a colonel in North Korea’s military spy agency had defected to the South a year ago.