North Korea’s young heir apparent has launched a purge of senior party and military officials in an apparent attempt to cement his grip on power, a North Korean defectors’ group said yesterday.
Pyongyang this month began a crackdown on senior officials suspected of corruption, starting in Musan County in the northeastern province of North Hamkyong, the Seoul-based North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said.
A spokesman said the information came from North Korean sources whom he described as senior party officials closely connected with the investigation.
“About 15 heavyweight officials, many of them military, are being investigated for turning a blind eye to people fleeing the country and being involved in smuggling activities,” the spokesman said.
He said the investigation was being led by Kim Jong-un, youngest son and chosen successor to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
The crackdown, which would be expanded into a nationwide campaign, was a “politically motivated purge” aimed at replacing longstanding military members with younger officials more loyal to Kim Jong-un, the spokesman said.
“This is a purge for generational change ... senior officials are trembling with fear because they don’t know where heads are going to roll,” he said.
Seoul’s intelligence agency declined to comment on the report. The Kim dynasty, which has ruled the country with an iron fist for more than six decades, has long used purges to maintain its grip on power.
Founding president Kim Il-sung reportedly executed hundreds of dissidents during the early years of his leadership and often persecuted senior officials showing signs of rebelliousness.
Kim Jong-il, after taking over from his father, is known to have executed several hundred soldiers for showing “suspicious movements,” yesterday’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported. Kim Jong-un, believed to be aged 27, was made a general and given powerful party posts at the country’s largest political gathering for 30 years in September.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened
RSS