South Korea has arrested two North Korean agents it says were sent to assassinate the highest-ranking North Korean official to have defected to the South.
The two North Koreans had themselves claimed to be defectors, but South Korean officials said on Wednesday that the pair were actually on a secret mission to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, a former top official in North Korea's ruling Workers' Party.
Hwang, said to have been a key architect of the North's socialist ideology, once mentored the North's leader, Kim Jong-il, but has been fiercely critical of him since defecting in 1997.
Prosecutors in Seoul indicted the two suspected assassins for national security law violations and conspiracy to commit murder.
The plot was uncovered during routine questioning given to North Korean refugees, an official with the South's spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, said.
The suspected assassins have been named as Kim Myong-ho and Dong Myong-kwan, both 36 and said to be North Korean army majors. They entered South Korea in January and February via Thailand, claiming refugee status.
North Korean defectors almost always first cross into neighbouring China before seeking entry into the South via a third country.
Under questioning, they confessed that their military boss ordered them to report about Hwang's activities in South Korea and be ready to "slit the betrayer's throat", a senior district prosecutor said on condition of anonymity.
The arrests come at a sensitive time in ties between the two Koreas, following the deadly sinking of a South Korean navy ship last month, which many in the South believe may have been torpedoed by the North.
Protection
Hwang, 87, lives under heavy protection and tight secrecy in South Korea.
Those close to him have said that during his fiery anti-North speeches, he will not drink water provided to him on the podium out of concern that it could be poisoned.
Hwang returned to Seoul this week after a rare trip to the US, where he criticised North Korea's government.
Speaking to journalists and academics in Washington late last month, he said he decided to flee the North after Kim's policies led to mass starvation in the mid-1990s and has no regret about his decision.
"Everybody other than Kim Jong-il in North Korea are slaves, serfs," Hwang had said.
But he said change in the North could come only through diplomacy and economic strategies, not military force.
Instead of targeting Kim, Hwang said, the North Koreans should be told of their own country's human rights abuses and of the democratic freedoms they could enjoy under a different system.
The trip was only Hwang's second ever to the US.
South Korea's previous governments restricted his overseas travel because of worries that his criticism of the North could complicate efforts to reconcile with Pyongyang, and that he could become a target for assassination.
South Korea's current conservative government lifted that ban, saying it amounted to a human rights violation.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2010/04/20104215349387433.html
Man... north korea sucks. Didn't they send like a whole team of guys to kill someone, and they all got caught by some run of the mill patrol cops when they were like a hundred yards from their target?
So much for the old cloak and dagger.
>>2
Are you thinking of this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bak_Jeong-hee#The_Blue_House_Raid
>On January 19, 1968, an armed North Korean guerrilla unit under the Revolutionary Party for Reunification attempted to assassinate Park and nearly succeeded. They were spotted by four South Korean civilians out cutting wood. After spending several hours trying to indoctrinate the civilians about the benefits of communism, the guerrillas let the civilians free with a stern warning not to notify the police. However, the civilians informed the police that very night.
I doubt all of what you said is valid.
I've heard of Liberals who hate that we're still fighting a war in the oily East but little of Conservatives who do more than angst the fact. Instead, they're rather angry the White House is trying to force/delude with an arbitrary pull-out date that they keep moving around. Additionally, criticism of President Obama has been about his non-military international efforts and his domestic program, not his "overseas contingency" conduct; has Limbaugh called him a war criminal yet (has he? I don't listen to the guy but I know if there's something radical to say he'd be the one to willingly say it whether or not other people believed it)?
As for the effort to now expand oil drilling, this is nothing new. There has been some desire to push for expanding energy such as domestic oil drilling and nuclear construction for a number of years now, often little reported. In fact, a lot of territory off the coast of California is already well-documented and mapped and Shell or ExxonMobil could get working on an unobtrusive method of oil extraction within a month were they allowed to tomorrow. Those who push for the expansions now probably are using the war to try and tug heart strings - after-all, who wouldn't want to make it less likely we'd stay entangled there for the wrong reasons? - but is more a reaction to what is seen as an unrealistic Green national energy plan.
http://www.digitalnasties.com/shop/theres-always-wednesday-p-12.html
Why?
One word: Immigration.
Since 1970, America's largest source of immigrants has been Latin America, especially Mexico. More than half of these Latino immigrants lack a high school diploma.
Compare the U.S. experience with Canada's. More than half of all immigrants to Canada possess a university degree. Half of all Canada's Ph.D.s are foreign-born.
Why does America choose poorly educated immigrants? The short answer: America does not choose them. They choose themselves.
In the last decade, half of all the immigrants to the United States arrived illegally. Even many of the legal arrivals gained entry courtesy of relatives who originally slipped into the country against the law, then somehow regularized themselves.
By contrast, Canada (a country of 1/10 the U.S. population that takes proportionately many more immigrants than the United States) allows almost no illegal immigration.
The result: While immigration has enhanced the average skill level of the Canadian population, it has detracted from the average skill level of the U.S. population.
Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility, from great-grandpa stepping off the boat at Ellis Island to a present generation of professionals and technology workers. This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans.
Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their scholarly work, "Falling Behind or Moving Up?"
They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.
North Korean plots often fail as the country has created a Stalinist theme park for its citizens to live in. They have no idea of how the outside world operates. In a world where fantasy foreign terrorists are responsible for everything their own government does wrong from power outages to famines, they see no reason why the same shouldn't be true for everyone else.
Koreans tell a lie, I am Japanese.
Korea does not return the stolen statue of Buddha.
South Korea has bilk money borrowed at the time of the World Cup.
Korea has to be compared to Japan at any time.
Koreans have not seen a human being equally.
Hide inconvenient facts Korea.
South Korea has borrowed a lot of money so far, I have not yet returned to Japan.
Lotte and Samsung is a Korean company.