North Korea Executed and Purged Top Nuclear Negotiators, South Korean Report Says (6)

Associated Pres
May 30, 2019

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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has executed its special envoy to the United States on spying charges, as its leader, Kim Jong-un, has engineered a sweeping purge of the country’s top nuclear negotiators after the breakdown of his second summit meeting with President Trump, a major South Korean daily reported on Friday.

Kim Hyok-chol, the envoy, was executed by firing squad in March at the Mirim airfield in a suburb of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest daily, reported on Friday, citing an anonymous source. Mr. Kim faced the charge that he was “won over by the American imperialists to betray the supreme leader,” the newspaper said.

Four officials of the North Korean Foreign Ministry were also executed, the South Korean daily reported, without providing any hint of who its source might be or how it obtained the information.

South Korean officials could not confirm the Chosun Ilbo report. North Korea has not reported any execution or purge of top officials in recent months. The country remains the world’s most isolated, and outside intelligence agencies have sometimes failed to figure out or have misinterpreted what was going on in the closely guarded inner circles of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

Asked at a news conference in Berlin on Friday about the Chosun Ilbo report, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said American officials were looking into it.

The rumors of North Korean negotiators being executed at the orders of Mr. Kim have been floating around Washington for weeks, and Mr. Pompeo has been asked about them before. Each time, he has said the United States is looking into the reports.

No American officials have spoken publicly of any intelligence they might have seen that would confirm or refute the rumors. Diplomats in Washington from other countries have also acknowledged hearing the rumors, but have said they have no confirmation.

But some signs in recent weeks have led analysts in South Korea to speculate that Mr. Kim may be engineering a reshuffle or a purge of his negotiating team in the wake of the summit meeting, held in February in Hanoi, Vietnam. The meeting was widely seen as a huge embarrassment for Mr. Kim, who is supposedly seen as infallible in his totalitarian state.