NKorea believed to have publicly executed 6 officials

By Alex Jensen

SEOUL (AA) – North Korea publicly executed several officials deemed responsible for the escape of overseas workers to South Korea earlier this year, according to sources “familiar with the matter” Friday.

The executions are said to have taken place in May, a month after 13 restaurant staff members fled their post in China.

Pyongyang later accused South Korea of being involved in their kidnapping -- an accusation strongly denied by Seoul, which has welcomed tens of thousands of defectors from the North since the 1990s.

“North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered six officials, including intelligence officials, to be executed publicly on May 5 due to their lack of control over overseas [North Korean] workers,” Choi Seong-yong, chairman of the Abductees' Family Union, was quoted as saying by news agency Yonhap.

Choi, whose group advocates for South Koreans abducted by the North, said the sources also revealed that 80 officials and another 100 relatives of overseas workers were made to watch the execution.

North Korea previously urged Seoul to at least allow the restaurant escapees to meet with their loved ones back home -- a request that was rejected considering Pyongyang’s record of punishing supposed traitors and dissidents.

The relatives of the defectors who made it to the South in April were then locked up and “forced” to take ideological education, Choi claimed.

Intelligence gathering from the reclusive North has been notoriously challenging, however, and past reports of purges have sometimes been exaggerated or entirely inaccurate.

But a United Nations rapporteur found two years ago that North Korea has inflicted widespread human rights violations on its people, often on political grounds.

Defectors have regularly spoken of public executions in an authoritarian state ruled by the Kim family since being founded following Korea’s division in the wake of World War II.

The North appears to be struggling to maintain order among supposedly loyal subjects posted abroad, with reports this week also suggesting that workers escaped to South Korea from Malta since last summer.

Pyongyang has been operating under strengthened economic sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January.