News / Koreas

High-ranking North Korean spy defects to South

Monday, 11 April 2016 10:49 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 11 April 2016 10:48 PM ]

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (AFP)

A high-ranking North Korean intelligence officer specializing in espionage has recently defected to South Korea, says Seoul.

Before defecting in May last year the military colonel worked for the North’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance where he was engaged in intelligence gathering operations against Seoul, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on Monday.

A South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman has confirmed the report without giving further information.

“He is the highest-level military official to have ever defected to the South,” said another unnamed official. “He is believed to have stated details about the bureau’s operations against South Korea to the authorities here.”

The latest news comes just days after a group of 13 North Korean workers employed in a state-run restaurant located China’s southeastern port city of Ningbo defected to the South.

According to reports, they arrived on Thursday after travel through a third Southeast Asian country. The group of 12 women and one man decided to defect after seeing Pyongyang's propaganda broadcast on television and the Internet.

In March, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong announced that the US and its allies were engaged in what he referred to as a "human rights racket" against North Korea in which "so-called North Korean defectors" received over $5,000 to "fabricate" lies about the situation in his country.

In order to earn a living, the defectors “are compelled to continue to fabricate and sell groundless testimonies by trying to make them sound as shocking as possible,” he said.

The defections come at a time of heightened tensions in the Korean peninsula. Pyongyang condemns Seoul and Washington for pushing UN sanctions against the North’s nuclear and missile programs and has also reacted severely to the joint US-South Korea annual military drills that kicked off last month.

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