Two senior North Korean diplomats who were key figures in the negotiations with the United States during the time of escalating tensions and later summit talks with President Donald J. Trump faced severe consequences a few years ago. One was executed, and the other was sentenced to a penal colony, as revealed by a North Korean defector this week.
There has been no independent confirmation of these claims, and it remains unclear whether these punitive actions were directly linked to the failure of the diplomatic efforts. Nevertheless, the collapse of the talks was widely viewed as a significant setback for Mr. Kim Jong-un.
The defector, Ri Il-kyu, aged 52, disclosed this information in an interview with a newspaper in Seoul, marking the first public revelation of his defection. Ri was a political counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba before he fled to South Korea in November last year, making him the highest-ranking North Korean official known to have defected to the South in nearly a decade.
In the interview with the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo on Sunday, published on Tuesday, Mr. Ri shed light on the fates of Ri Yong-ho and Han Song-ryol. Ri Yong-ho, the former North Korean foreign minister, and Han Song-ryol, a deputy diplomat, were prominent figures in North Korean diplomatic relations with Washington. However, they mysteriously disappeared from North Korean state media.
According to Mr. Ri, the former foreign minister Ri Yong-ho, who had accompanied Kim Jong-un to his summit meetings with President Trump, was sent to a prison camp in December 2019 on charges of accepting bribes from a North Korean diplomat in Beijing. The execution of Mr. Han Song-ryol in February 2019, on charges of espionage for Washington, was witnessed by senior officials of the North Korean Foreign Ministry at a military academy in a Pyongyang suburb, as revealed by the defector.
