Published : Feb. 25, 2018 - 18:44
South Korean President Moon Jae-in held a surprise meeting Sunday with North Korea's chief delegate to the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said.
The previously unannounced meeting with Kim Yong-chol, a suspected mastermind of North Korea's deadly naval attack in 2010, was held in PyeongChang, the host city of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, located some 180 kilometers east of Seoul.
"President Moon held a meeting with Kim Yong-chol, the chief of the North Korean delegation to the Olympics, in PyeongChang from 17:00 to around 18:00 today," a Cheong Wa Dae official told reporters.
(Yonhap)
The meeting came only hours after the eight-member North Korean delegation crossed the inter-Korean border to attend the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, set to begin at 8 p.m.
It marked Moon's second meeting with North Korean officials in just about two weeks. He held talks at his office Cheong Wa Dae on Feb. 10 with a delegation which was led by the communist state's ceremonial head of state, Kim Yong-nam and included leader Kim Jong-un's sister, Kim Yo-jong.
Kim Yo-jong became the only member of the Kim family to have visited South Korea since the end of 1950-53 Korean War. She carried a special message from her brother, inviting Moon to Pyongyang in the near future. The two Koreas held inter-Korean summits in 2000 and 2007.
Still, Sunday's meeting came as a surprise as the chief of the latest delegation is a highly decorated military general, who is suspected of having masterminded the North's sinking of a South Korean warship, Cheonan, in March 2010, that left 46 South Korean sailors dead.
Kim, a vice chairman of the Central Committee of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, is currently in charge of inter-Korean affairs, according to officials here.
Hundreds of people, including representatives of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party, earlier gathered just south of the inter-Korean border to protest, if not block, the visit by the North Korean official to the South.
The two Koreas technically remain at war as the Korean War ended only with an armistice, not a peace treaty. (Yonhap)