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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un issued a rare apology on Friday for what he described as the “unexpected and shameful” killing of a South Korean at sea, the Seoul presidential office said.
Apologies from the North, much less attributed to Kim personally, are extremely unusual, and the message comes with inter-Korean ties frozen and in the midst of a showdown in the nuclear negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington.
Analysts said North Korea was seeking to placate its neighbor after the shooting – the first time its forces killed a southern citizen in a decade – sparked outrage in the South, and President Moon Jae-in called it “shocking”.
The fisheries official was shot dead on Tuesday by North Korean soldiers, and Seoul says his body was set on fire while still in the water, apparently as a precaution against coronavirus infection.
Kim was “very sorry” for the “unexpected and embarrassing event” that had “disappointed President Moon and the South Koreans,” rather than helping them in the face of the “malicious coronavirus,” said Suh Hoon, the South’s national security adviser.
Suh was reading a letter from the department of the ruling Northern party responsible for relations with the South.
In it, Pyongyang acknowledged having fired around 10 shots at the man, who had “illegally entered our waters” and refused to properly identify himself.
Border guards shot him in accordance with current instructions, he said.
There was no immediate confirmation of the content of the letter from the North, whose state media did not mention the incident on Friday.
North Korean defector-turned-Seoul-based investigator Ahn Chan-il said it was “extremely rare for North Korea’s supreme commander to offer an apology, especially to South Koreans and their president.”
“I think this is the first since the 1976 Korean ax murder incident,” he said, referring to the killing of two US officers in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, added: “Kim Jong Un’s alleged apology reduces the risk of escalation between the two Koreas and keeps the Moon government’s hopes of compromise alive.”
It was a “diplomatic move” that “avoids a possible fight in the short term and preserves the option of reaping long-term benefits from Seoul,” he said.
A US State Department official told AFP that Kim’s apology was “a useful step.”
The murder caused a furor in the south. Moon, a constant advocate for better relations with Pyongyang, said it could not be tolerated for any reason.
In an editorial on Friday, the Korea JoongAng Daily said it was “enraged by the abominable act of North Korea.”
“The act of murdering an unarmed man and burning his body cannot be excused in any way,” he said.
The man, who was wearing a life jacket, disappeared from a patrol boat near the western border island of Yeonpyeong on Monday, and North Korean forces located him in its waters more than 24 hours later.
South Korean media reports said he was 40 years old with two children, but had recently been divorced and was in financial trouble.
Seoul military officials say the man was interrogated while in the water for several hours and expressed a desire to defect, but was killed after an “order from a higher authority.”
The North’s letter said his body was no longer visible after the shooting and troops set fire to his flotation device, which was covered in blood, in accordance with national emergency prevention regulations.
North Korea’s crumbling health system would struggle to cope with a major virus outbreak, but it has not confirmed a single case of the disease that has spread around the world after taking drastic measures to prevent local infections.
Pyongyang closed its border with China in January and state media said authorities had raised the state of emergency to the highest level in July.
The North closed the border town of Kaesong in the same month after a defector who had fled south three years ago slipped across the heavily fortified border, with the possibility that he may have brought the disease into the country.
The commander of the United States Forces in Korea, Robert Abrams, said earlier this month that North Korean authorities had issued shoot-to-kill orders to prevent the coronavirus from entering from China, creating a “buffer zone” on the border. .
cdl / slb / gle / rma / sst
