UPDATE : A North Korean diplomat who was until recently acting ambassador to Italy has gone missing, a South Korean member of parliament said on Thursday, after a South Korean newspaper reported he was seeking asylum in the West.
Earlier Update: The Italian Foreign Ministry says the envoy who had been North Korea’s acting ambassador in Rome has not asked Italian authorities for asylum.
South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers in Seoul on Thursday that North Korean diplomat Jo Song Gil went into hiding with his wife in November before his term in Italy ended. His whereabouts are not publicly known now.
Italy on Thursday noted that it had been notified in the past that Jo’s spell as a diplomat in Italy had ended and thus he no longer held any diplomatic position in Italy.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the diplomat might have sought asylum from another country’s embassy or consulate in Italy.
Washington Post
North Korea’s top diplomat in Italy has sought asylum, according to a report, in what would be another high-profile defection bid by one of Pyongyang’s envoys.
Jo Song-gil, the acting North Korean ambassador to Rome, applied for asylum to an unidentified western country with his family, South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo daily said, citing unnamed diplomatic sources in Seoul.
“He sought asylum early last month,” the JoongAng quoted one source as saying.
Italian authorities were “agonising” over what to do, the official was quoted as saying, but added that they were “protecting him in a safe place”.
The last senior North Korean diplomat to defect was Thae Yong-ho, who abandoned his post as deputy ambassador in London in 2016. Jo, 48, has been acting ambassador in Rome since October 2017 after Italy expelled then-ambassador Mun Jong-nam in protest at a nuclear test by the North a month earlier in violation of UN resolutions.
He is “known to be a son or son-in-law of one of the highest-level officials in the North’s regime”, the JoongAng cited an unnamed North Korea expert as saying.
