By Lee Hyo-sik
A high-security safe house where the late Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking North Korean to defect to South Korea, spent the last years of his life, is likely to be put up for sale due to extensive public exposure.
Since Hwang’s death Sunday, the location and the purpose of the house have been disclosed to the public as news media outlets extensively covered intelligence officials, police officers and coroners going in and out of the residence. As a result, key figures whose lives are threatened for various reasons would no longer be safe there. The residence is located in an affluent neighborhood in southern Seoul.
A government official familiar with the matter said Tuesday that the photos of surveillance cameras and other security installations in and around the residence have been compromised, adding it cannot be used as a safe house for important figures at high security risk anymore. “The government will discuss what to do with the house after Hwang’s funeral. Selling it will likely be one of the options.”
There had been a rumor that the former secretary of the North’s Workers’ Party who defected to the South in 1997 owned the house. But the residence has belonged to the government since 1994, according to a certified copy of the real estate register.
The house is built on 463.4 square meters and its value is estimated to be about 1.82 billion won according to government-assessed standard prices. But given the fact that the state assessment is usually around 50-70 percent of market value, the residence is valued at some 3 billion won, realtors operating in the neighborhood said.
In the meantime, the late Hwang reportedly has a 49-year-old wife and an 11-year-old son, according to Newsis, an online-based news service provider. It had reported that Hwang’s step daughter Kim Sook-hyang, 68, who has been acting as a chief mourner at his funeral, is his only legitimate family member.
But soon after Hwang defected to the south, he secretly married one of his female secretaries and fathered a son, Newsis said. Neither of them are on Hwang’s family register.
It said due to security risks, his son was sent to Canada and then to the United States where he is currently attending an elementary school. He took his mother’s last name, not Hwang’s, and the alleged wife travels between Korea and the U.S.
Given this, disputes may arise over who will inherit Hwang’s estate. He is known to have accumulated substantial wealth by authoring over a dozen books and giving lectures on North Korea at home and abroad.
He also received significant donations from the government and anti-North Korean organizations.