SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea accused the South Korean and American intelligence agencies on Friday of plotting to assassinate its leader, Kim Jong-un, and threatened an unspecified counterattack.
North Korea recently uncovered “a hideous terrorist group” that the National Intelligence Service of South Korea, working with the American C.I.A., had sent into the North on a secret mission to kill Kim with biochemical agents, said a spokesman of the North’s Ministry of State Security.
In a statement carried by the North’s official news agency, KCNA, the unidentified spokesman said the National Intelligence Service had hired a North Korean logger working in Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, in 2014 to prepare for “state-sponsored terrorism.”
Officers at the National Intelligence Service were said to have trained the man, providing him with $20,000 and a satellite transmitter-receiver. They then infiltrated the “human scum” into North Korea, giving him instructions last year on how to assassinate Kim, the spokesman said.
The spy agency later provided the man with additional cash to hire co-conspirators, the statement said.
“Korean-style antiterrorist attack will be commenced from this moment to sweep away the intelligence and plot-breeding organisations of the US imperialists and the puppet clique, the meanest and brutal hideous terrorist group in the world,” the statement added.
The National Intelligence Service dismissed the accusations as groundless.
North Korea stands accused of assassinating Kim Jong-nam, Kim’s estranged half brother, with a banned chemical weapon at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February.
The Malaysian police have arrested two women, one from Indonesia and another from Vietnam, and charged them with murder, accusing them of smearing VX nerve agent on Kim Jong-nam’s face at the instruction of North Korean officers. The North suggested that the victim had died of a heart attack.
