THE face that stares from Kim Jong Su’s passport shows a rather woebegone man in suit and tie. In fact, Mr Kim is a taekwondo master and, allegedly, a North Korean spy. In 2015 he was detained in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, along with a counsellor in North Korea’s embassy in South Africa after their vehicle was stopped by police. Inside was almost $100,000 in cash and 4.5 kilos of rhino horn. They were released after the North Korean ambassador to South Africa intervened. In 2016, Mr Kim slipped out of South Africa.
This and other such stories are contained in a new report published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a Geneva-based lobby. The author, Julian Rademeyer, found that North Koreans were implicated in 18 of the 29 rhino-horn- and ivory-smuggling cases involving diplomats since 1986. How much of this shadowy commerce is for personal gain, and how much is to meet the North Korean regime’s thirst for hard currency, is impossible...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2jQcDRy
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