North Korea Accuses South and U.S. of Plotting to Kill Kim Jong-un

Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, in April. North Korea stands accused of assassinating his estranged half brother, Kim Jong-nam, in February. Credit Korean Central News Agency, via Reuters

SEOUL, South Korea — In a region already tense over nuclear threats, North Korea accused the South Korean and American intelligence agencies on Friday of plotting to assassinate its leader, Kim Jong-un, and it warned of an unspecified counterattack.

North Korea recently uncovered a “hideous terrorists’ group” that the National Intelligence Service of South Korea, working with the C.I.A., had sent into the North on a secret mission to kill Mr. Kim with biochemical agents, said a spokesman for 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 Mr. Kim, the spokesman said.

The idea was to launch a bombing attack at a military parade attended by Mr. Kim, the North Korean statement 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 organizations of the U.S. imperialists and the puppet clique, the most mean 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, Mr. 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 the other 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, whose body was released to North Korea, had died of a heart attack.

North Korea’s claim on Friday came amid a growing movement in the United States Congress to have the country returned to the State Department’s list of designated state sponsors of terrorism. It was removed in 2008 as part of an effort to get the North to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. North Korea has since continued to test nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, escalating tensions in the region, and it has vowed not to be dissuaded.

In recent years, North Korea has arrested a few South Korean citizens on charges of spying for the National Intelligence Service. It is also holding at least three Americans on charges of “hostile acts,” including a Korean-American named Kim Dong-chul, whom it accused of spying for the South.

It remains impossible to verify these claims. The National Intelligence Service dismisses them as propaganda.

North Korea also makes an improbable claim that more than 30,000 North Korean defectors who fled to South Korea in the last two decades had been kidnapped by the South.

When it accused the South Korean spy agency in these cases, it usually named the C.I.A. as a co-conspirator or the mastermind. In North Korean propaganda, South Korea remains a “puppet” of the Americans.

Still, it is highly unusual for the North to assert that the South’s spy agency plotted to assassinate Mr. Kim.

In recent months, as tensions intensified on the Korean Peninsula, the North has reacted stridently to news reports out of South Korea that United States and South Korean commando units were training to “decapitate” the North Korean leadership in case of war. The North’s totalitarian leadership is especially sensitive to any hint of criticism of or threat to its top leader.

It is widely believed to have mounted a hacking attack of Sony Pictures in 2014 as a retaliation against “The Interview,” a comedy based on a fictional plot to assassinate Mr. Kim.

When North Korea executed Mr. Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, it accused him of plotting to overthrow Mr. Kim’s government.

Over the decades, there have been occasional, unconfirmed reports of quickly put down, armed rebellions or assassination attempts in the North. But longtime North Korea observers say that organized subversion is highly unlikely in the North’s police state, where huge numbers of soldiers and security agents are dedicated to the sole task of protecting Mr. Kim.

When Mr. Kim and his father, the dictator Kim Jong-il, before him were scheduled to appear in public, agents removed residents from apartments near the location of an appearance and even searched roadside ditches as a precaution, said defectors from the North who had served in its security agencies. Soldiers who were designated to shake hands with Mr. Kim had to wash their hands first, the defectors said.

In 2004, an enormous explosion at a train station on the border with China prompted rumors of an attempt to kill Kim Jong-il, who had passed through nine hours earlier on his way back from Beijing. Two trains carrying fuel had collided, killing or injuring as many as 3,000 people, but no connection to the leader’s travel was ever confirmed.

The Supreme Guard Command, an elite bodyguard unit protecting the Kim family, once arrested an enemy agent, a former North Korean Army captain said in an interview in 2015. But he added that the command might have concocted the case as propaganda. Like most defectors from the North, the former captain insisted on the condition of anonymity when speaking to the news media.

In the fraught history of Korea, however, the idea of there having been assassination attempts is not far-fetched.

North Korean commandos came within striking distance of the South Korean president’s home, the Blue House, in 1968 before being repelled. One agent caught alive said his team had snaked through the inter-Korean border to “slit the throat” of the South Korean leader at the time, Park Chung-hee. In retaliation, Mr. Park’s government trained a secret unit with a mission to assassinate his nemesis, Kim Il-sung, Mr. Kim’s grandfather. The unit was disbanded without carrying out its mission.

North Korea tried to assassinate another South Korean dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, while he was visiting Burma, now Myanmar, in 1983. The bombs planted by its officers destroyed the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in what was then the Burmese capital, killing 21 people, including several South Korean cabinet ministers. Mr. Chun escaped the attack because his arrival there had been delayed.

NYtimes