Seoul, Corea.– Two senior North Korean diplomats who negotiated with the United States as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded threats of war and then held diplomatic talks with President Donald Trump were purged a few years ago: one was executed and the other sentenced to a penal colony, a North Korean defector said this week.
There was no independent confirmation of the allegations and it was not clear whether the punitive actions were due to failed diplomatic efforts, but the collapse of the talks was widely seen as a major embarrassment for Kim.
The defector, Ri Il-kyu, 52, made the remarks in an interview with a Seoul newspaper, which was also the first time his defection was made public. Ri was a political counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba when he fled to South Korea last November. He is the highest-ranking North Korean official known to have defected to the South in nearly a decade.
In the interview, conducted on Sunday by the conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper and published on Tuesday, Ri discussed the fate of Ri Yong-ho and Han Song-ryol, the former foreign minister and the latter vice minister. They were two of North Korea’s best-known diplomats in their relations with Washington, but they soon disappeared from North Korean state media.
The former foreign minister who accompanied Kim to his two summit meetings with Trump was sent to a prison camp in December 2019 on charges of accepting bribes from a North Korean diplomat in Beijing, the defector said.
He is the highest-ranking North Korean official to be “purged” following the failure of Kim’s talks with Trump.
Meanwhile, Han Song-ryol was executed in February 2019 on charges of spying for Washington, Ri told the Chosun Ilbo.
Senior officials from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry had gathered to witness his execution by firing squad at a military academy in a suburb of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, he said.
“For days, those who saw it could barely eat,” Ri said, adding that he did not attend the execution because he was preparing to travel to the North Korean Embassy in Cuba at the time.
South Korea’s spy agency on Tuesday declined to comment on the allegations.
Kim and Trump held the first meeting between their two countries in Singapore in June 2018. But their diplomacy collapsed when their second meeting, held in Hanoi in February 2019, ended without an agreement on how to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program or when to ease United Nations sanctions imposed on Pyongyang.
Han, a longtime North Korean mission to the United Nations, was best known as Pyongyang’s point man in the so-called New York channel, a rare diplomatic conduit between North Korea and Washington. Han returned home in 2013 to become vice foreign minister in charge of relations with the United States.
But Han was sidelined a few months before the Singapore meeting and, according to the defector, was executed a couple of weeks before Kim’s second summit with Trump.
North Korean defectors living in South Korea have alleged in recent years that Han was accused of spying for Washington after he was found to be in possession of a large sum of dollars following his stint at the UN.
Since taking power in 2011, Kim has organized a series of bloody political purges to eliminate or execute many senior officials seen as obstacles to his rule or accused of political mistakes.
Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek was executed in 2013 on charges of corruption and plotting a military coup against Kim.
The leader’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, was assassinated by North Korean agents at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in 2017.
Ri told the paper he decided to defect after his bosses at the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang demanded bribes and the ministry rejected his request to travel to Mexico for treatment for back pain.
He was the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat to defect since Thae Yong Ho, a minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, fled to South Korea in 2016.
Ri said she once shared tea with Kim.
“When you see him in person, the first thing that comes to mind is, ‘He must have very high blood pressure,’” she said, echoing widespread speculation about Kim’s health.
“His face is red as if he were always drunk. It’s redder than it looks on TV.”
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