Plot to kill N Korean defector foiled

SOUTH KOREAN police have arrested two North Korean agents sent to kill Hwang Jang-yop, the most famous defector to flee from behind the bamboo curtain.

Police say one of the would-be assassins tried to take his own life after confessing to the plot, which comes amid rising tensions between the two bitter cold-war enemies.

Reports in the South Korean press say the men were under orders from Lt Gen Kim Yong-chol, the shadowy head of a new military reconnaissance unit in Pyongyang, to “cut Hwang’s head off”.

Mr Hwang (87) is the North’s top-ranked defector. He was a secretary of the ruling Workers’ Party, reportedly a mentor to leader Kim Jong-il and the man credited with creating the isolated nation’s official philosophy of self-reliance. He reportedly enraged Mr Kim when he fled for the South in 1997 and is believed to have been the target of several assassination attempts.

Interviewed last night by a South Korean broadcaster, Mr Hwang said he was “unconcerned” by reports of the plot.

According to South Korea's JoongAngnewspaper, the agents, Kim Yong-ho (36) and Dong Myong-gwan (36), trained in China before arriving in Thailand last year posing as defectors. The newspaper says the men, both majors in the North Korean army, were deported to the South as refugees earlier this year but confessed their mission when questioned about their motives for defecting.

Both sides of the Korean Peninsula have been in a state of uneasy truce, punctuated by sabre rattling and bouts of explosive violence, since an armistice ended a brutal three-year war in 1953.

North Korean refugee Lee Han-yong, a nephew of Mr Kim’s mistress, was murdered in South Korea soon after Mr Hwang’s 1997 defection, in what was apparently a revenge attack.

Many South Koreans believe the North was behind last month’s sinking of a frigate near a disputed sea border, which took the lives of 46 sailors. A tearful South Korean president Lee Myung-bak vowed this week to “go to the very end” to uncover the cause of the sinking.