North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his late father, Kim Jong-il, used fraudulently obtained Brazilian passports to apply for visas to visit Western countries in the 1990s, five senior Western European security sources said.
While North Korea’s ruling family is known to have used travel documents obtained under false pretenses, there are few specific examples. The photocopies of the Brazilian passports seen by reporters have not been published before.
“They used these Brazilian passports, which clearly show the photographs of Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-il to attempt to obtain visas from foreign embassies,” one senior Western security source said on condition of anonymity.
“This shows the desire for travel and points to the ruling family’s attempts to build a possible escape route,” the security source said.
The North Korean embassy in Brazil declined to comment.
The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it is investigating.
A Brazilian source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the two passports in question were legitimate documents when sent out as blanks for consulates to issue.
Four other senior Western European security sources confirmed that the two Brazilian passports with photographs of the Kims and the names of Josef Pwag and Ijong Tchoi were used to apply for visas in at least two Western countries.
It was unclear whether any visas were issued.
The passports may also have been used to travel to Brazil, Japan and Hong Kong, the security sources said.
Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported in 2011 that Kim Jong-un visited Tokyo as a child using a Brazilian passport in 1991 — before the issue date on the two Brazilian passports shown to reporters.
Both 10-year passports carry a stamp saying “Embassy of Brazil in Prague” with a Feb. 26, 1996, issue date.
The security sources said facial recognition technology confirmed the photographs were those of Kim Jong-un and his father.
The passport with Kim Jong-un’s photograph was issued in the name of Josef Pwag with Feb. 1, 1983, as the date of birth.
So little is known about Kim Jong-un that even his birth date is disputed. He would have been between 12 and 14 years old when the Brazilian passport was issued.
He is known to have been educated at an international school in Berne, Switzerland, where he pretended to be the son of an embassy chauffeur.
Kim Jong-il’s passport was issued in the name of Ijong Tchoi with a birth date of April 4, 1940. His true birth date was in 1941, and he died in 2011.
Both passports list the holders’ birthplaces as Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The first security source declined to describe how the passport copies had been obtained, citing secrecy rules.
Reuters has only seen photocopies of the passports so was unable to discern if they had been tampered with.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS