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July 21,2012 | Korea JoongAng Daily

A North Korean defector, arrested by the North for allegedly attempting to destroy key communist statues,
has said he was ordered by South Korean and U.S. intelligence to launch the attacks, claims flatly denied by Seoul.

Earlier in the week, the North said it had arrested North Korean defectors who planned to destroy statues of North
Korea’s leadership.

The communist country accused South Korea’s intelligence unit and the U.S. of masterminding the plot and inserting
defectors into the North.




In a televised news conference held Thursday in Pyongyang, the North identified a middle-aged man named Jon
Yong-chol as one of the arrested terrorist suspects and aired the man’s account of how the attack was conceived
and arranged.

In the conference, which the North said was attended by foreign correspondents and covered by the North’s official
Korean Central News Agency, Jon claimed he was persuaded by a group of North Korean defectors in the South,
the South’s spy unit and the U.S. to go back into the communist country to launch the attacks.

Jon said he was first approached by a defector named Kim Song-min who heads an anti-North group in South Korea.
Kim persuaded him to work for a defectors’ organization that was set up to launch attacks on the statues of North
Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung.

Jon later met two South Korean intelligence agents and was promised remote-controlled explosives for the mission,
he claimed.

In the conference, Jon said he had defected to the South in 2010 and stayed in the South Korea’s re-education
institution for defectors.

A day after the North’s accusation, the South Korean spy unit identified the defector as a 52-year-old of the same
name who came here in November, 2010. He spent three months in the rehabilitation facility before settling down in
a town in Gangwon Province, west of Seoul, the unit said.

However, the North’s accusations over the South Korean intelligence service’s involvement are groundless, a spy
agency official said.