North Korea is stepping up its security over fears of a possible assassination attempt on its leader Kim Jong Un, South Korea’s spy agency has said.
New security measures include the use of vehicles that can jam communications and drone-detecting equipment, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said during a parliamentary audit session on Tuesday, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
It cited Rep. Lee Seong-kweun of the ruling People Power Party and Rep. Park Sun-won of the main opposition Democratic Party.
Kim has made 110 public appearances so far this year, the NIS reportedly said, which is 60 percent more than last year.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivers a speech in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Sept. 9, 2024. Security around Kim has been beefed up, South Korea’s spy agency has said.
AP
Hong Min, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told NK News that alleged South Korean drone flights may have created “a sense of vulnerability” for Kim.
On Saturday, a North Korean Defense Ministry official said that if South Korea infringes on the reclusive nation’s waters, airspace or territory one more time, an “immediate retaliatory attack will be launched.”
They said authorities had discovered a South Korean drone in one of Pyongyang’s districts that “crashed” up to a week earlier.
“North Korea’s one-sided claims are not worth verifying, nor do they merit a response,” the South Korean Defense Ministry said.
“If the safety of our citizens is threatened in any way our military will respond with stern and thorough retaliation,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement earlier this month.
This comes amid fears of North Korea’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, Europe’s largest conflict since World War II, with the country having deployed around 10,000 troops to fight for Russia, the Pentagon reported on Monday.
North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui left for Moscow on Monday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.
In a closed-door hearing at South Korea’s parliament, the NIS said Choe may be engaged in high-level talks about dispatching additional troops to Russia and negotiating what support North Korea would receive from Russia in return, according to lawmaker Lee Seong-kweun, who was present at the meeting.
North Korea did not specify the purpose of the trip. Newsweek has contacted the Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the United Nations Office, the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Unit of State Visits, via email, for comment.
All the while, fears of North Korea preparing for war with its southern neighbor are growing—amid the current rhetoric between the two nations and strengthening ties between Pyongyang and Moscow.
Earlier this month, North Korea blew up parts of roads and railway lines heading for the border after its army said it would “completely separate” the two Koreas because of the “imminent danger of war.”
Technically, the Koreas are still at war, as they have been since an armistice marked the end of hostilities in the Korean War in 1953, but Pyongyang has formally renounced the goal of reunification with the south, a decades-held objective that has cast Seoul as the “principal enemy.”
