(Seoul) South Korea on Friday accused North Korea of plotting “terrorist” attacks against its embassies and expatriates, and raised its alert level for its diplomatic missions in five countries.
In a statement, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said it had “detected numerous signs that North Korea is planning terrorist attacks against our embassy staff or citizens in several countries.” citing China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
“North Korea has sent agents to these countries to increase surveillance of South Korean embassies and also engages in specific activities such as searching for South Korean citizens who could become potential targets” of acts of terrorism, added the NIS.
On Thursday, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry announced that it had raised the anti-terrorism alert level for its embassies in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, as well as its consulates in Shenyang, northeast China, and in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East.
Pyongyang also has diplomatic representations in these five places.
Wave of defections
According to the NIS, these threats appear to be linked to a wave of defections by North Korean expatriates stranded abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic and who are seeking by any means to avoid returning, now that Pyongyang has reopened its borders.
Defection is a serious crime in North Korea and those who attempt it face very severe penalties, as do their families back home. Even people indirectly linked to the defecting individual can be punished.
The NIS said it suspected North Korean diplomats of sending false reports to Pyongyang, blaming the defections on “external circumstances” – namely, incentives from South Korea – in order to avoid being involved. deemed responsible.
The result is that the North Korean regime could be “preparing retaliation” against South Korean diplomats, he believes.
A total of 196 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea last year, the highest number since 2017, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Reunification. Around ten of them belonged to the country’s elite, such as diplomats and their families.
North Korea, already one of the most closed countries in the world, sealed its borders in early 2020 to protect against COVID-19, preventing diplomats and other expatriate North Koreans from returning to their homes. country.
According to experts, this prolonged stay abroad may have led many to increasingly doubt their country’s isolated regime.
“By living abroad, these North Koreans were able to send their children to normal schools, thus avoiding propaganda education and the constant need to obey the regime,” explains AFP Ahn Chan-il, a defector who runs the Global Institute for North Korea Studies.
According to him, “North Korean diplomats and agents stationed abroad are under constant and brutal pressure from Pyongyang to deal with the defections of elite expatriates. We cannot rule out the possibility of an attack against South Koreans abroad.”
In addition, “the end of the pandemic has allowed North Korean agents, previously confined to their country, to go on missions abroad, while South Koreans can also travel without any restrictions,” notes the ‘AFP Lee Man-jong, president of the Korean Association for the Study of Terrorism.
Several precedents
A North Korean attack on South Koreans abroad would not be a first.
Pyongyang is suspected of being behind the 1996 assassination of Choi Duk-keun, a South Korean consul in Vladivostok. Mr. Choi was knocked unconscious in the stairwell of his apartment building and was also injected with poison. The perpetrators of the crime were never found.
According to South Korean media, the consul, also a secret agent, was investigating North Korea’s clandestine activities in the Russian Far East, including drug trafficking and currency counterfeiting.
In November 1987, a bomb planted by a couple of North Korean agents exploded on board a Korean Air plane flying between Baghdad and Seoul, killing all 115 people on board, almost all of them South Korean nationals. .
And in October 1983, three North Korean agents detonated a bomb in Rangoon, Burma, during a visit by then-South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan. The latter survived but 21 people, including several of his ministers, were killed.