By Park Si-soo
A self-professed North Korean defector has been arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill a leading anti-Pyongyang activist in Seoul, prosecutors confirmed Friday.
The prosecution and the National Intelligence Service said the man, surnamed Ahn, targeted Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector who has led a high-profile campaign to send propaganda leaflets into the North for years.
Recent leaflets include stories of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in hopes of inspiring North Koreans to rise up against their leader Kim Jong-il. Pyongyang has angrily criticized Park and other activists, threatening to kill them for sending such leaflets over the border.
The arrest comes as the two countries are stepping up efforts to resume dialogue to ease inter-Korean tensions.
The suspect in his 40s was a commando before defecting to the South in the late 1990s.
Prosecutors said he was armed with weapons for assassination, including poison needles, when he was apprehended.
Park said the suspect asked to meet him in a subway station in Seoul earlier this month, offering to help his leaflet campaign. However, Park did not show up after being tipped off by NIS agents on the suspect’s possible assassination attempt.
“He asked me to come to the station alone,” Yonhap News Agency quoted Park as saying. Ahn was taken into custody by intelligence operatives at the subway station. If charged under Seoul’s National Security Law, he could face the death penalty.
The arrest came less than two weeks after a South Korean missionary died in the Chinese border city of Dandong just across from North Korea after suddenly collapsing on the street. Close aides to the late missionary claimed that he was poisoned by a North Korean agent, though an autopsy found no evidence.
In July last year, two North Korean agents were sentenced to 10 years in prison by a court on charges of attempting to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, the former secretary of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party. Authorities also arrested another North Korean spy a month later on the same charge.
Hwang, the architect of North Korea’s “juche” or self-reliance ideology before he defected, was a vocal critic of the North Korean leader. He died from heart failure late last year.
In a recent interview with The Korea Times, Park said, “The truth will set them free. I’m confident about that.”
Inter-Korean relations dropped to the lowest level in years following the sinking of a South Korean warship by North Korea in March last year and the shelling of a South Korean border island the following November.
Seoul has stepped up its crackdown on pro-North activities. In August, prosecutors said they arrested five South Koreans on suspicion of spying for Pyongyang. South Korea’s new prosecutor-general vowed that month to conduct a “war against pro-North Korean forces.”