Hand over the plotters
Kim regime wants enemies extradited
CRAZED North Korean officials say they will demand the extradition of anyone they believe to have been involved in an alleged CIA plot to kill leader Kim Jung-un last month with a biochemical poison.
Han Song Ryol, Pyongyang’s vice-foreign minister, summoned foreign diplomats to a meeting in Pyongyang to officially outline the North’s allegation that the CIA and South Korea’s intelligence agency bribed and coerced a North Korean timber worker into joining in the assassination plot, supposedly thwarted last month.
The allegations came as US National Intelligence Director Dan Coats warned North Korea’s nuclear weapons program posed a potentially “existential” threat to America.
Mr Coats said the unprecedented nuclear and missile testing last year indicates Kim Jong-un is intent on proving North Korea’s capability.
North Korea’s UN Mission yesterday issued a statement calling the purported plot to kill Kim a “declaration of war”.
It said the aim was to hurt “the mental mainstay that all the Korean people absolutely trust” and “eclipse the eternal sun” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the country’s official name. The North’s state media first mentioned the plot last week.
“We will ferret out and mercilessly destroy to the last one the terrorists of the U.S. CIA” the statement added.
The UN mission said the Ministry of State Security has declared that an “anti-terrorist offensive will be commenced to mop up the intelligence and plot-breeding organisations of the US and South Korea.”
Han took that a step further with the extradition statement. “According to our law, the Central Public Prosecutor’s Office of the DPRK will ... demand the handover of the criminals involved, so as to punish the organisers, conspirators and followers of this terrible state-sponsored terrorism,” he said.
North Korea claims the primary suspect, known as Kim, was a Pyongyang man who worked for a time in the Russian Far East.
The North further said a South Korean agent named Jo Ki Chol and a “secret agent” named Xu Guanghai, director general of the Qingdao NAZCA Trade Co. Ltd, met Kim in Dandong, on North Korea’s border with China, to give him communications equipment and cash.
The North also said “a guy surnamed Han” taught Kim how to enlist accomplices.
“These terrorists plotted and planned in detail for the use of biochemical substances including radioactive and poisonous substances as the means of assassination,” ViceMinister Han said.
“These biochemical substances were to be provided with the assistance of the CIA ... while the South Korean Intelligence Service was going to provide necessary support and funding for this attempt at assassination on our supreme leader.”
WE WILL FERRET OUT AND MERCILESSLY DESTROY TO THE LAST ONE THE TERRORISTS OF THE U.S. CIA NORTH KOREAN STATEMENT