North Korea's acting ambassador to Kuwait defects to the South

© Kcna/Via ReutersNorth Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves during a ceremony in Pyongyang on Jan. 14.

SEOUL -North Korea's top diplomat in Kuwait secretly defected with his family to South Korea where they have been living since 2019, two people in the defector community familiar with the case said on Monday.

Ryu Hyun-woo, who was North Korea's acting ambassador to Kuwait when he fled, is one of the highest-level regime officials to defect in recent years, and a potential source of embarrassment for the country's leader, Kim Jong Un.

His defection, which was first reported by South Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper, has raised fresh questions about the loyalty of North Korea's privileged elite, especially those who have exposure to the outside world.

"I decided to defect in order to let my children have a better future," Ryu was quoted as saying in the report Monday.

The public exposure of Ryu's arrival in South Korea, which had remained confidential until now, could be another irritant in Seoul's already prickly relations with Pyongyang and its effort to resume disarmament negotiations.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service and the Unification Ministry both refused to comment on the matter on Monday.

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North Korean diplomats who defect can provide information on the regime's overseas operations, including money-laundering and smuggling activities designed to dodge international sanctions and raise foreign currency.

Ryu reached South Korea in September 2019, only a couple of months after Pyongyang's former top envoy to Rome, Jo Song-gil, also arrived in the country, a person familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

Jo and his wife had disappeared days before he was scheduled to return to Pyongyang in November 2018. He turned up in South Korea the following year, but he has kept a low profile since then.

Ryu was subject to extensive questioning by Seoul's National Intelligence Service over three months until December that year, the person said.

He became the acting ambassador in Kuwait in 2017 after then-ambassador So Chang Sik was expelled by the Kuwaiti authorities following a United Nations Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea over its weapons development.

Ryu is the son-in-law of Jon Il Chun, who managed secret moneymaking operations for the ruling Workers' Party of North Korea, news reports said.

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Tae Yong-ho, formerly a senior North Korean diplomat and now an elected lawmaker in the South, highlighted the significance of Ryu's defection, as "a privileged member" of the North Korean elite.

Tae said the Kuwait mission where Ryu worked played a central role in managing tens of thousands of North Korean migrant workers in the country and in the region.

"However privileged a life you led in North Korea, your thoughts change once you go abroad and draw comparisons," said Tae, who fled his post as Pyongyang's deputy envoy to London in 2016. He changed the English spelling of his name from Thae after entering parliament last year to conform to South Korean transliteration style.

While defections by senior officials are rare, some 30,000 North Koreans have escaped the country to flee political repression and economic poverty since the end of the Korean War in the 1950s, according to South Korea's Unification Ministry.

Escape became especially difficult last year, as North Korea shut its international borders to keep out the coronavirus. The number of North Korean defectors arriving in the South hit a record low of 229 in 2020, down 78 percent from the previous year.

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