Duo 'out to slay defector'

SEOUL - Authorities arrested two North Koreans for allegedly posing as defectors to South Korea and plotting to assassinate the most senior North Korean official ever to defect to Seoul.

Hwang Jang Yop, a former senior member of the North's ruling Workers' Party who once mentored leader Kim Jong Il, defected to the South in 1997. He has written books and given lectures condemning Kim's regime as totalitarian and now lives under tight secrecy in South Korea.

On Tuesday, Seoul prosecutors arrested two North Korean Army majors for entering South Korea by posing as ordinary defectors with an alleged mission to kill the 87-year-old Hwang, according to Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office.

The two, both 36, confessed to investigators that their military boss ordered them to report about Hwang's activities in South Korea and be ready to "slit the betrayer's throat", said a senior district prosecutor.

The men, named as Kim Myong Ho and Dong Myong Kwan - entered South Korea in January and February via Thailand. Their plot was revealed while they underwent an intense investigation on their motive for defecting, the prosecutor said.

A spokesman at the National Intelligence Service confirmed the arrest of the men but didn't provide further details. Hwang returned to Seoul this week after a rare trip to the US, where he harshly criticised North Korea's authoritarian communist regime.

Hwang, speaking to journalists and academics in Washington late last month, said he decided to flee the North after Kim's policies led to mass starvation in the mid-1990s.

"Everybody other than Kim Jong Il in North Korea are slaves, serfs," Hwang said at the time.

- AP