The former Minister of Foreign Affairs of North Korea Ri Yong-ho would have been executed last year, according to the Japanese newspaper today Yomiuri Shimbun attributing the information to various anonymous sources.
Ri Yong-howho has not been seen in public for several years, would have been executed between the summer and autumn of last year along with four or five country officials, according to these sources who say they are close to North Korean domestic policy to the correspondent of said newspaper in Beijing.
News about executions of members of the North Korean regime are frequent in the South Korean, Japanese or Hong Kong media, but the secrecy of the country makes it very difficult to contrast this information, which has often turned out to be wrong.
Although the sources consulted by Yomiuri They assure that the reason for this supposed purge “is not clear”, they say that it could be related to an incident linked to the embassy of North Korea in the United Kingdom, since most of these civil servants worked at some point in this legation where Ri Yong-ho He held the post of ambassador in the first decade of this century.
The role of Ri Yong-ho
Ri Yong-howho became the North Korean delegate in the so-called six-party talks, was appointed as foreign minister in 2016, a position from which he played an important role in the negotiations with the US for the 2018 and 2019 summits between the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-unand the then US President, Donald Trump.
It was Ri and the now Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui who offered a press conference to explain the North Korean position at the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019.
In January 2020, the North Korean regime replaced Ri with Ri Son-gwonwho directed the body in charge in the North of relations with the South during the most recent phase of rapprochement.
The news of the possible execution comes after a year in which North Korea It has carried out a record number of tests on weapons of mass destruction, around fifty, and in which the tension on the Korean peninsula has reached new highs. (EFE)
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