North Korean diplomat defects

Jeong declined to give details on the timing of Thae’s arrival or his itinerary.

More seriously, Mr. Thae is the most senior North Korean diplomat to cross over in two decades. A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office said, “It’s not a story we’re commenting on”. It also said that the case shows the North’s ruling elites see no hope and the regime’s internal solidarity is weakening. In April, twelve waitresses of a North Korean restaurant in the city of Ningbo (East China) and their supervisor had also defected to South Korea. A total of 814 North Koreans have defected to the South as of July this year, or an annual increase of 15 percent, a ministry official told Reuters. Many North Korean officials are not permitted to bring their families on overseas posts, making their continued safety an incentive to keep in line. He made a high-profile defection via the South Korean embassy in Beijing in 1997 and died in Seoul in 2010.

Thae Yong Ho and his family defected to South Korea, the Unification Ministry in Seoul confirmed on Wednesday. North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January, and South Korea has been working hard to apply more worldwide pressure on the North.

“The defection of a diplomat would allow intelligence services and military forces in other countries to learn more about the level of support that Kim Jong-un enjoys, recent developments in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes, or the extent to which real economic reforms are being implemented”. He led a North Korean delegation that held talks with European Union representatives over the North’s human rights situation in Brussels in 2001, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

New satellites images from the 38 North website reveal activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site, showing a canopy has been erected to block the view of USA spy satellites.

North and South Korea are technically still at war after an armistice, not a peace treaty, agreement was penned following the conflict that took place between 1950-53.

Warwick Morris, a former British ambassador to South Korea who had met Thae on about four occasions, said that the diplomat was “smooth and sophisticated in a slightly North Korean kind of way”.

Thae Yong Ho, a cosmopolitan career diplomat, was a key official at the embassy, in a residential area of west London, and is thought to have escorted Kim Jong Chol, the North Korean leader’s older brother, during his trip to the United Kingdom previous year to attend an Eric Clapton concert.

And in recent missile tests, North Korea has fired: mobile missiles that are hard to track, submarine launched missiles, also hard to track, and intercontinental missiles that can potentially reach Alaska.