AUTHORITIES IN Seoul say they have foiled an assassination attempt by a North Korean ex-commando, who came south armed with poison needles to kill one of the world’s most outspoken anti-Pyongyang activists.
Officials with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reportedly stopped the man, known as Ahn, on his way to murder defector-turned-campaigner Park Sang-hak, who has enraged the North with a noisy campaign to topple the regime of Kim Jong-il.
In a plot reminiscent of the cold war killing in London of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was stabbed with a ricin-tipped umbrella, Ahn planned to poison or stab his quarry with the needles, according to sources quoted in the South Korean media.
Mr Park is the controversial chairman of the Freedom Fighters of North Korea, which claims to have sent 10 million propaganda messages in balloons across the Demilitarized Zone into the isolated Stalinist backwater. In 2008, he met former US president George Bush who called him a “great freedom fighter”.
The son of a North Korean spy, he defected over a decade ago and has since become one of the regime’s most implacable enemies, travelling the world to describe torture, mass starvation and public executions, all of which occur “regularly”, he says.
“We have to let the world know about the atrocities in North Korea and help our brothers and sisters there,” he told the Oslo Freedom human rights forum in 2009. He told his audience that three million people died of starvation in the 1990s after the North’s food distribution system failed. “It is truly a living hell on earth.”
Relations on the Korean peninsula have worsened since the election of the South’s conservative President Lee Myung-bak, who has effectively ended a decade of detente known as the Sunshine Policy. Both sides came close to full-scale hostilities last November after the North shelled an island near the border, killing four people.
Last year, South Korean police arrested two Pyongyang agents sent to kill Hwang Jang-yop, the North’s most famous defector. Both men confessed and have since been jailed. The North has denied any involvement in the plot but it has a long history of assassination attempts: Lee Han-yong, a nephew of Kim Jong-il’s mistress, was murdered in South Korea soon after Hwang’s 1997 defection, in what was apparently a revenge attack.
Mr Park told the media that his would-be killer asked to meet him earlier this month. “Ahn told me by phone that he was to be accompanied by a visitor from Japan who wants to help our efforts. But then I was told by the NIS not to go,” Mr Park told AFP news agency.
Mr Park’s propaganda activities reportedly so enraged the North that its soldiers have threatened to fire on him and his group unless they stop their so-called balloon missions. The balloons are loaded with leaflets describing the revolutions in the Middle East and DVDs showing Kim Jong-il, his heir apparent and other familiy members in the crosshairs of a gun.