A history of political killings

SEOUL // The killing of the North Korean leader’s outcast half brother could be the latest in a long list of assassinations, or attempts, in which the country is suspected of targeting estranged relatives of the Kim clan, turncoats and South Korean public figures.

Traitor cousin

Lee Han- young, a nephew of one of the former wives of North Korea’s second leader, Kim Jong Il, was found dead from gunshot wounds in front of a Seoul flat in 1997.

Lee defected to South Korea through Switzerland in 1982, but Seoul kept his arrival secret until 1996, when his mother also fled the North.

An investigation concluded that Lee, who criticised his dictator uncle, was killed by North Korean agents who returned home before they could be caught.

Blast in Yangon

North Korean agents set off a bomb meant for South Korea’s leader while he was visiting Burma in 1983.

President Chun Doo-Hwan escaped the blast but more than 20 people were killed. One North Korean agent was shot dead by police, a second was executed and a third reportedly died in prison in 2008.

South korean president

A team of 31 North Korean commandos slipped into South Korea in 1968 and came within striking distance of the presidential palace in Seoul before being repelled by South Korean security forces. The only commando captured said he had come to slit the throat of president Park Chung-hee.

A furious Park established a commando team tasked with demolishing the Pyongyang palace of North Korea’s founder. Tensions later eased, but the South Korean commando team, incensed that the planned infiltration was aborted, mutinied in 1971, killing the team’s trainers and marching on Seoul before being stopped.

High-profile defector

In 2010, two agents posing as defectors were arrested in a plot to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, a former Workers’ Party secretary who is the highest- level North Korean to seek asylum in the South.

South Korea said the agents were majors in North Korea’s main army intelligence agency. Hwang, who once tutored Kim Jong Il, criticised the North Korean government after his 1997 defection.

He died six months after the arrests, at the age of 87.