North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Han Song Ryol on Thursday demanded the U.S. and South Korea “hand over” the “terror suspects” involved in what Pyongyang claims was a plot to assassinate dictator Kim Jong-un.
“The Central Prosecutor’s Office will ask for the handover of those criminals and prosecute them under the relevant laws,” said North Korea’s Han.
He vowed that his government would “find out all of the terrorist maniacs and mercilessly wipe them out.”
Reuters notes that Han did not identify the individuals North Korea is seeking, or even specify how many people were involved in the alleged plot. According to Chinese and North Korean media, the Kim regime has vowed to hunt down every one of the suspects, “in every corner of the earth.”
Last week, North Korea accused the CIA and South Korean intelligence of hatching a “vicious plot” to assassinate Kim Jong-un with “biochemical substances,” “radioactive substances,” and “nano-poisonous substances,” which would slowly turn the corpulent Supreme Leader into a corpse over the span of “six to twelve months.”
The North Koreans claimed the CIA and South Korea had “ideologically corrupted and bribed” a North Korean lumberjack whose last name was “Kim.” He was supposedly recruited by foreign agents while he was working in the Russian timber industry.
The Associated Press noticed that this alleged assassination plot sounds an awful lot like what happened to Kim Jong-nam, brother of the current dictator, who was murdered with a chemical weapon in Malaysia. North Korea has been blamed for the murder, causing a significant diplomatic rift with Malaysia, formerly one of the few countries on friendly terms with Pyongyang.
“We will ferret out and mercilessly destroy to the last one the terrorists of the US CIA and the puppet IS of South Korea,” vowed the North Korean Ministry of State Security last week. “The heinous crime, which was recently uncovered and smashed in the DPRK, is a kind of terrorism against not only the DPRK but the justice and conscience of humankind and an act of mangling the future of humankind.”
Reuters notes the CIA and White House “declined to comment” after the Ministry of State Security released its statement last week, while the South Korean Intelligence Service (IS) called the charges “groundless.”
On Tuesday, North Korean defector Song Byeok called on U.S. President Donald Trump to topple the Kim regime, warning that conflict is “unavoidable” at this point.
Song, a former propaganda artist who lost part of his right finger in a concentration camp and watched his family starve in a famine twenty years ago, now lives in South Korea. He produces artwork satirizing Kim Jong-un and his regime.
He told the UK Daily Mail that Kim is “very young, in his 30s, and his character is very unpredictable. We don’t know what he is going to do.”
“I worry that he will attack and another Korea War, the same thing that happened in the Eighties, will happen all over again and many people will lose their lives,” he said.
Song said the Kim regime would never surrender its power, in part because high officials fear what the people might do to them if the regime fell. He also predicted many “ordinary citizens” in North Korea would refuse to fight for the regime in the event of a conflict.
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