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Ryu Hyun-woo arrived in the country and applied for asylum in September 2019, but his arrival has so far been kept secret, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported.
About 30 thousand. North Koreans, mostly crossing the less protected Chinese border, escaped poverty and repression from the communist regime and settled in the capitalist south.
Retirements of high-ranking officials are rare. However, two months before Ryu Hyun-woo’s arrival in South Korea, North Korea’s former acting ambassador to Italy, His Song Gil, asked Seoul to grant him asylum.
“I decided to leave because I wanted to offer my son a better future,” Ryu Hyun-woo quoted the Maeil Business Newspaper as saying.
He became an acting ambassador to Kuwait in September 2017, when the Gulf country sent envoy So Chang Sika to implement a UN resolution on Pyongyang’s weapons programs.
Ryu Hyun-woo is reportedly the son-in-law of Jon Il Chun, the former head of the 39th office of North Korean leaders managing secret funds.
Another high-ranking fugitive, Tae Yong-ho, who resigned as North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom in 2016 and was elected South Korean opposition MP last year, called Ryu Hyun-woo a representative of the “elite highest “in Pyongyang.
The legislature added: “No matter how privileged your life in North Korea is, your mindset changes as you travel abroad and start comparing.”
North Korea has tightened security at its borders in response to the coronavirus threat, thus significantly reducing the flow of people to its southern neighbor last year.
However, Tae Yong-ho stressed that the leader of the Pyongyang regime, Kim Jong Un, “will not be able to dissuade North Koreans who long for the freedom to go to South Korea forever.”
Relations between the two Koreans have severely cooled since 2019, when Kim Jong Uno’s meeting with former US President Donald Trump in Hanoi collapsed without reaching an agreement on what Pyongyang should give up in exchange for loosening. international sanctions.
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