[imText1]A half length statue of Lee In Mo is to be set up on Tongil(Unification) Street in Pyongyang, according to a December 21 report of Chosun Shinbo, a publication of Chongryon (General Association of North Korean Residents in Japan). Lee In Mo is the repatriated former North Korean agent who spent more than three decades in a South Korean prison for the violation of the National Security Law of South Korea.
The report said, “Chairman Kim Jong Il directed to build a half-length statue of Lee In Mo to hand down his name to posterity. Sculptors at Mansudae Art Institution are now carving the Lee’s statue.”
When Lee In Mo passed away on June 16th of this year, the Chairman Kim sent a wreath to his funeral as an expression of deep condolences over his death, and ordered to accord a national funeral for Lee and bury his body in a special mausoleum constructed to honor patriots who died for the North, the report said
On the chairman’s order, sculptors at Mansudae Art Institution have been working since the late July to produce the Lee’s statue, which depicts his long-term imprisonment in the South with an image of Lee wearing a prisoner’s uniform and being shacked with iron chains, the report said.
Lee In Mo was a North Korean war correspondent affiliated with the Department of Culture of the People’s Army during the Korean War. He was captured while operating in the South, and spent thirty-four years in prison until his release in 1988. In March 1993, he was repatriated to the North through the truce village of Panmunjom.
The Chosun Shinbo report said, “Lee firmly defended his integrity as a revolutionary during his thirty-four years of imprisonment in the South. The Chairman Kim titled him an ‘incarnation of faith and will’ and ‘Hero of the Republic,’ and presented him the Kim Il Sung Medal and Unification Award.”
The regime had the ailing Lee receive medical care at Bongwha Clinic, an exclusive hospital for high party cadres and Kim Jong Il’s family, and even allowed him to get medical treatment in the US in May 1996.
