A top North Korean military official, known to be behind the communist nation’s deadly attacks on South Korea in 2010, died over the weekend, Pyongyang’s media said Monday.
Gen. Kim Kyok-sik died Sunday of respiratory failure at the age of 77 after suffering from an unidentified cancer, according to the Rodong Sinmun, the communist party’s official newspaper.
South Korean officials said he is believed to have led the North’s torpedo attack on a South Korean warship in March 2010 and the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea eight months later. He was in charge of the 4th Corps in Hwanghae Province near the western border with the South at that time.
The deadly sinking of South Korean naval corvette Cheonan killed 46 sailors. The North’s shelling of the border island left four people including two civilians dead, the first North Korean artillery attack on home soil since the 1950-53 Korean War.
The two Koreas are still technically at war as the Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.
Kim was named as the North’s armed forces minister in October
2012 before being replaced by Jang Jong-nam in May 2013. Later, he was tapped as the chief of the KPA’s General Staff.
The People’s Armed Forces Ministry is equivalent to South Korea’s Defense Ministry and is placed under the control of the communist country’s top policy-making body.
The Ministry of Unification declined to comment on Kim’s death but added that there is no change in the Seoul government’s stance over the need to keep its punitive sanctions against North Korea following the warship sinking.
Since May 2010, South Korea has imposed sanctions on the North by banning economic and cultural exchanges to punish the North’s torpedoing of the warship. Seoul has called for Pyongyang to take responsibility for the incident, but the North has denied its role.
“Seoul’s basic stance over the warship sinking and the punitive sanctions remains intact,” Lim Byeong-cheol, the ministry spokesman, told a press briefing. (Yonhap)
