Seoul: N. Korea plotting attacks on embassy staff

South Korea’s embassies in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Shenyang in China and Vladivostok in Russia are under terrorism alert as Seoul warned that North Korea is plotting attacks on its diplomats and consular staff.

“North Korea has dispatched agents to these countries to expand surveillance of the South Korean embassies and is also engaging in specific activities such as searching for South Korean citizens as potential terrorist targets,” the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement on Friday.

The NIS cited defection by North Korean diplomats as a reason for Pyongyang’s plot of retaliation.

According to Seoul’s unification ministry, 196 North Korean defectors arrived in the South last year, with around 10 of them being from Pyongyang’s elite class, such as diplomats and possibly their children.

This marked the highest number of defections by North Korean elites to the South since 2017, according to Seoul.

Also, Pyongyang’s leader Kim Jong Un this year declared Seoul his country’s “principal enemy,” jettisoning agencies dedicated to reunification and outreach, and threatened war over “even 0.001 mm” of territorial infringement.

North Korea has diplomatic ties with more than 150 countries, according to Seoul’s Unification Ministry, but the number of missions it maintains overseas has been shrinking since the 1990s due to financial constraints.

North Korea has a track record of staging terror attacks against South Korea in the past few decades, including the 1987 midair bombing of a South Korean airliner near Myanmar that killed all 115 people aboard, Yonhap reported.