News of another North Korean spy captured while disguising himself as a defector has been released. Seoul District Prosecutors’ Office detained the man known only as Kim on the 19th on charges of violating the National Security Law.
Kim is said to have arrived in South Korea through China and Southeast Asia last April after receiving training from North Korea’s Defense Security Command. He was found to be a spy during the normal process of investigation by the South Korean government upon arrival.
An intelligence official, revealing the news, tried to play it down, saying, “Because he was under constant investigation from the time of his arrival in South Korea, Kim was not able to perform any actual espionage activities.” He continued, “He had not yet received specific orders from North Korea.”
The authorities are bearing in mind the possibility of connections with other North Korean undercover spies in South Korea.
Following the August, 2008 ‘Won Jung Hwa’ incident, Kim Myeong Ho-Dong Myeong Kwan assassination team, who was dispatched to South Korea to assassinate the late Secretary of the North Korea Workers Party Hwang Jang Yeob was caught through the joint interrogation from the South Korea government on April of last year. In addition last September, undercover spies were arrested for trying to sting the Representatives of the North Korean defector with a poisoned needle.
Due to the increasing numbers of undercover spies caught by the public authorities in recent years, the authorities are working to improve the interrogation process.
The spies attempt to enter South Korea by disguising their backgrounds; however, it is not easy to get through the mandatory investigation now that the authorities in Seoul have in-depth information on regions from more than 20,000 defectors in South Korea.
The main objective of the dispatched undercover spies in South Korea is to lead to internal discord within the defector community. A significant rise in the number of terrorist threats by undercover spies has caused the defector community to look warily upon one another.
On this, the president of North Korea Freedom Coalition, Park Sang Hak pointed out, “North Korea’s objective is to keep families left back in North Korea as hostage and order the defectors in South Korea to work as activists to divide the defector community” and to bring that community to “lose the trust of the South Korean people and make them doubt the defector community.”
