Former North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho was reportedly executed last year, the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun said Wednesday (4/1/2023), citing the information to several anonymous sources.

Ri Yong-ho, who had not been seen in public for several years, was to be executed between summer and autumn last year along with four or five state officials, according to sources who said they were close to domestic politics. Korea to newspaper correspondents in Beijing.

News of the executions of members of the North Korean regime frequently appear in South Korean, Japanese or Hong Kong media, but state secrecy makes it very difficult to verify this information, which often turns out to be false.

Although sources consulted by the Yomiuri confirmed that the reasons for this purge were “vague”, they said that it may be related to incidents related to the North Korean embassy in the UK, since most of these officials worked at one time or another. at this embassy where Ri served as ambassador in the first decade of this century.

Ri, who was North Korea’s delegate to the so-called six-party talks, was appointed foreign minister in 2016, a position in which he played a key role in negotiations with the US for the 2018 and 2019 summits between North Korea. Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and then US President Donald Trump.

It was Ri and Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui who offered a press conference explaining North Korea’s position at the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019.

In January 2020, the North Korean regime replaced Ri with Ri Son-gwon, who headed the agency in charge of relations with the South in the North during its most recent rapprochement phase.

News of the possible executions comes after a year North Korea conducted a record test of weapons of mass destruction, some fifty, and in which tensions on the Korean peninsula have reached new highs. .

gs (efe, Yomiuri Shimbun, Yonhap News Agency)