North Korea will free a South Korean worker in the next few days after detaining him for nearly five months for allegedly insulting the country’s rulers, South Korean media said yesterday, quoting informed sources.
The release could decrease tension on the Korean Peninsula that has risen following the North’s May 25 nuclear test and threats to attack the South while easing concern among investors about a rupture in ties leading to chaos.
South Korean TV news broadcaster YTN said the release of the man identified by his family name Yoo could take place today, while others expected it by the end of the week. A Unification Ministry official would not comment on the reports.
Hyun Jeong-eun, chairwoman of the Hyundai Group, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in projects in the North went to Pyongyang on Monday to seek Yoo’s release.
The visit took place a week after former US president Bill Clinton met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and secured the freedom of two US journalists who had been held since March for suspected illegal entry.
Yoo has been held since late March at a joint factory park located in the border city of Kaesong. About 100 South Korean firms use cheap North Korean labor to make goods at the park.
The North’s propaganda machine will portray the trips by Clinton and Hyun as leaders paying tribute to Kim, analysts said. This will help erase doubts about his grip on power after the 67-year-old Kim was suspected of suffering a stroke last year and also help him press forward with his succession plans.
Repairing ties with Hyundai could also bolster the North’s state coffers, hit by UN sanctions for its nuclear test as well as a cut in aid from the South, which once sent handouts equal to about 5 percent of the North’s yearly economy.
Hyun said she wanted to restart a joint mountain resort in North Korea visited by more than 1 million South Koreans. It was shut last year after a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier after wandering into a military area.
Meanwhile, Seoul has repatriated two Chinese members of the Falun Gong spiritual group following a court decision not to grant them refugee status, officials said yesterday.
A justice ministry spokesman said they were deported last month following the earlier court decision. He declined to say whether more would be sent back.
In January last year a court granted refugee status to two Chinese Falun Gong practitioners, saying they would be persecuted back in China because of their beliefs.
It was the first time a local court had given members of the group refugee status.
But the court rejected similar petitions from 30 other people, saying they could not prove they had been persecuted in China and did not play leading roles in spreading the group’s teachings in South Korea.
In March this year the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision.
Lee Yanglan, a Korean-American Falun Gong practitioner, said Seoul sent three Falun Gong members back to China last month while two others await deportation in a detention center.
“This is in a way much worse than China’s expelling North Korean refugees ... that the [Seoul] government has been condemning all along,” she said in an e-mail.
The ministry spokesman denied accusations that Seoul was deporting Falun Gong members under pressure from the Chinese government: “The government cannot allow foreigners to stay illegally without clear evidence that they have been persecuted because of their faith.”
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was expected to meet Argentine President Javier Milei yesterday on a regional tour to drum up support ahead of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s swearing-in for a third term. Venezuelan authorities have offered a reward of US$100,000 for information leading to the capture of Gonzalez Urrutia, who insists he beat Maduro at the polls in July last year and is recognized by the US as Venezuela’s “president-elect.” The 75-year-old fled to Spain in September after being threatened with arrest by Maduro’s government, but has pledged to return to his country to be sworn in as
RSS