North Korea’s aged leader may be healthier than what the outside world suspects him to be, eyewitness accounts of people who saw him during the leader’s China visit, showed.
Kim Jong-il who has been making a secretive trip to China, has been very successful in being elusive. There has been no confirmed photo of him, taken by an enthusiastic pack of international journalists who have been tailing him.
But the Chosun Ilbo newspaper was able to interview some employees of a Chinese hotel where Kim had stayed.
The workers of the Wusong Hotel in Jilin, a northeastern city near the North Korean border, said Kim looked healthy.
“Kim Jong-il got off from the limousine without any help. He didn’t seem to have any health problem,” a worker there told the newspaper.
“His clothes, sunglasses and shoes – they all looked very expensive,” another employee added. The employees didn’t give their names, it said.
Another employee, who said he saw Kim in a “close distance,” said Kim “looked exactly the same as seen in newspapers.”
The workers said they didn’t know whether Kim Jong-un, the heir apparent, was among the visitors who stayed at the hotel.
“I can’t tell because I don’t know how he (the heir apparent) looks like,” a worker told the newspaper. But another said he didn’t hear Kim Jong-il’s son came there with his father, it said.