N. Korea claims plot reveals US state-sponsored terrorism

Associated Press

TOKYO

After arresting two American university instructors and laying out what it says was an elaborate, CIA-backed plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un, North Korea is claiming to be the victim of state-sponsored terrorism – from the White House.

The assertion comes as the U.S. is considering putting the North back on its list of terror sponsors. But the vitriolic outrage over the purported plan to assassinate Kim last month is also being doled out with an unusually big dollop of retaliation threats, raising a familiar question: What on Earth is going on in Pyongyang?

North Korea’s state-run media announced Sunday that an ethnic Korean man with U.S. citizenship was “intercepted” two days ago by authorities for unspecified hostile acts against the country. He was identified as Kim Hak Song, an employee of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.

That came just days after the North announced the detention of an accounting instructor at the same university, Kim Sang Dok, also a U.S. citizen, for “acts of hostility aimed to overturn” the country.

What, if anything, the arrests have to the purported plot is unknown. But they bring to four the number of U.S. citizens known to be in custody in the North.

“Obviously this is concerning,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Monday. “We are well aware of it, and we are going to work through the embassy of Sweden ... through our State Department to seek the release of the individuals there.”

Sweden handles U.S. consular affairs in North Korea.

According to state media reports that began Friday, the man purportedly at the center of the assassination plot is a Pyongyang resident who was “ideologically corrupted and bribed” by the CIA and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service while working in the timber industry in Siberia in 2014.

The reports say Kim was converted into a “terrorist full of repugnance and revenge against the supreme leadership” of North Korea and collaborated in an elaborate plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un at a series of events, including a major military parade, that took place last month.

The initial reports of the plot concluded with a vow by the Ministry of State Security to “ferret out to the last one” the organizers, conspirators and followers of the plot, which it called “state-sponsored terrorism.”

The North Korean reports also said a “Korean-style anti-terrorist attack” would begin immediately. Follow-up stories on the plot have focused on outraged North Koreans demanding revenge.

Tensions between North Korea and its chief adversaries – the U.S. and South Korea – have been rising over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, as well as joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises that include training for a possible “decapitation strike” to kill the North’s senior leaders.