North Korea executed its defense chief by putting him in front of an anti-aircraft gun at a firing range, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) told lawmakers, the latest in a series of high-level purges since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un took charge in Pyongyang.
Hyon Yong-chol, 66, who headed the isolated nation’s military, was charged with treason, including disobeying Kim and falling asleep during an event at which North Korea’s young leader was present, according to South Korean lawmakers briefed in a closed-door meeting with the spy agency yesterday.
His execution was watched by hundreds of people, they said.
Photo: AP
It was not clear how the NIS obtained the information and it is not possible to independently verify such reports from within secretive North Korea.
Experts on North Korea said there was no sign of instability in Pyongyang, but there could be if the purges continued.
Kim ordered the execution of 15 senior officials this year as punishment for challenging his authority, according to the NIS. In all, about 70 officials have been executed since Kim took over after his father’s death in 2011, Yonhap News Agency cited the NIS as saying.
“North Korean internal politics is very volatile these days. Internally, there does not seem to be any respect for Kim Jong-un within the core and middle levels of the North Korean leadership,” said Michael Madden, an expert on the nation’s leadership and contributor to the 38 North think tank.
“There is no clear or present danger to Kim Jong-un’s leadership or regime stability, but if this continues to happen into next year, then we should seriously start to think about revising our scenarios on North Korea,” he added.
Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea leadership expert at Dongguk University in Seoul, said the regime could “reach its limit” if Kim’s purges continued.
“However, it is still too early to tell,” Koh added.
The lawmakers said Hyon was executed at a firing range at the Kanggon Military Training Area, 22km north of Pyongyang.
The US-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea last month said that, according to satellite images, the range was likely used for an execution by ZPU-4 anti-aircraft guns in October last year. The target was just 30m away from the weapons, which have a range of 8,000m, it said.
Hyon, last known to have spoken publicly at a security conference in Moscow in April, was said to have shown disrespect to Kim by dozing off at a military event, the Seoul lawmakers said, citing the agency briefing.
Hyon was also believed to have voiced complaints against Kim and had not followed his orders several times, according to the lawmakers. He was arrested late last month and executed three days later without legal proceedings, the NIS said.
North Korea is one of the most insular nations in the world and its ruling power structure is highly opaque. The current leader is the third generation of the Kim family that has ruled with near-absolute power since the nation was established in 1948.
In 2013, Kim purged and executed his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, once considered the second-most powerful man in Pyongyang’s leadership circle, for factionalism and committing crimes damaging to the economy, along with a group of officials close to him.
Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul, said that the purges in Pyongyang do not necessarily point to instability.
“The common assumption is that it is bad for stability, but I’m not so sure,” he said, likening the situation to former Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s purges. “The young boy is not necessarily popular with the military, so he wants to show that he is in control and he is the boss.”
Pyongyang’s military leadership has been in a state of perpetual reshuffle since Kim took power.
Kim, who is in his early 30s, has changed his armed forces chief four times since coming to power. His father Kim Jong-il, who ruled the isolated nuclear-capable nation for almost two decades, replaced his chief just three times.
Hyon, a little-known general, was promoted within the military at the same time as Kim Jong-un in 2010. He became a vice marshal of the North Korean army in 2012.
The South Korean spy agency told lawmakers that Ma Won-chun, known as North Korea’s chief architect of new infrastructure under Kim Jong-un, was also purged or punished, the lawmakers said.
Ma had also once served as vice director of the secretive Finance and Accounting Department in the ruling Workers’ Party and, until recently, was effectively the regime’s money man.
He had been regularly photographed alongside Kim Jong-un in state propaganda images, but had not made any reported appearances since November last year.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of