[Courtesy of Xinhua News]
A colonel-level officer from North Korea's military espionage unit has defected to South Korea, officials said Monday, days after a group of 13 restaurant workers from the communist country arrived in Seoul.
The rare defection by an elite North Korean army officer came last year, the South's unification ministry said, declining to disclose details.
"The defector was a colonel," ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee said, adding the officer had worked at the North's Reconnaissance General Bureau tasked with carrying out espionage missions.
He also confirmed a newspaper report that a diplomat had defected to South Korea with his wife and two sons in May last year.
South Korea's spy agency said earlier that North Korean government, party and military officials have fled the isolated country since leader Kim Jong-un took over from his late father in late 2011. Kim has earned a reputation for ruthlessness, and under his reign of terror, a number of senior North Korean officials have been purged, including his uncle and former mentor, Jang Song-thaek.
38 North, the website of a US research institute, said in an earlier article that the North's military espionage bureau, headed by Kim Yong-chol, a party secretary in charge of intelligence gathering and espionage operations abroad, is suspected of conducting psychological and other operations, including a series of cyber and GPS attacks against South Korea.
Last month South Korea accused North Korea of discharging strong electric waves to disrupt Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals.
Seoul has also blamed North Korean hackers for deploying malware and virus-carry emails for a series of cyber attacks on military institutions, banks, government agencies, TV broadcasters and media websites in recent years.
Pyongyang's alleged cyberattacks prompted Seoul to set up a special cyber command in 2010 amid growing concern over its vulnerability. The South's Defence Ministry believes North Korea runs a cyber warfare unit with up to 6,000 personnel.
Last week, a male manager and 12 female workers dispatched by North Korea to one of its state-controlled restaurants abroad defected to South Korea from a third country.
The unification ministry said the mass defection demonstrated Pyongyang's worsening financial woes aggravated by international sanctions. Some 130 North Korean restaurants abroad have served as one of Pyongyang's important sources of hard currency.
Before coming to Seoul, the 13 defectors had been under strong pressure from Pyongyang to transmit more money to their homeland, the ministry said, adding many North Korean restaurants abroad are now in a financial pinch because of strengthened UN sanctions which followed Pyongyang's nuclear and long-range rocket tests.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
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