North Korea will send a secretary of its ruling Workers' Party to Seoul Friday to pay respects to the late former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency Thursday.
"Upon authorization of Kim Jong-il, chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission, a special envoy group led by Kim Ki-nam, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, will visit Seoul from August 21 to 22 to mourn the death of ex-President Kim Dae-jung," the KCNA was quoted as saying in a one-sentence dispatch from Pyongyang.
Kim died of complications from pneumonia Monday at 85. A state funeral will be held Sunday at the National Assembly in Yeoui-do.
Kim Ki-nam, one of Kim Jong-il's close aides, handles propaganda and history education, but has also accompanied the North Korean leader on his outdoor activities.
The secretary also visited Seoul in 2005 for a festival to celebrate Korea's liberation from the Japanese colonial rule and called Kim Dae-jung at the Severance Hospital, where the former president was hospitalized for pneumonia.
Kim Dae-jung had a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim in June 2000, the first of its kind since the separation of the two Koreas after the peninsula's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, to produce rapprochement measures.
Among them are tour projects that bring South Koreans to North Korea's scenic Mt. Geumgang and its medieval capital city of Kaesong, and a joint industrial park in Gaeseong near the South Korean border.
The visit could serve as a possible catalyst to break the ice in inter-Korean ties after the inauguration of hard-line South Korean President Lee Myung-bak early last year.