North Korean Diplomat Defects to the South, Shares News of Political Purge

Two senior North Korean diplomats who negotiated with the United States when the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, exchanged threats of war and later held summit talks with President Donald J. Trump were purged a few years ago — one executed and the other sentenced to a penal colony, a North Korean defector said this week.

There was no independent confirmation of the allegations nor was it clear whether the punitive actions stemmed from the failure of the diplomatic efforts. But the breakdown of the talks was widely seen as a major embarrassment for Mr. Kim.

The defector, Ri Il-kyu, 52, made the comments in an interview with a newspaper in Seoul, which was also the first time his defection became public. Mr. Ri was a political counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba when he fled to South Korea last November. He is the most senior North Korean official known to defect to the South in nearly a decade.

In the interview, conducted by the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo on Sunday and published on Tuesday, Mr. Ri spoke about the fates of Ri Yong-ho and Han Song-ryol, the former a foreign minister and the latter a deputy. They were among the best-known North Korean diplomats dealing with Washington. But they soon disappeared from North Korean state media.

Mr. Ri, the former foreign minister, accompanied Mr. Kim to his two summit meetings with Mr. Trump. He was sent to a prison camp in December 2019 on charges of collecting bribes from a North Korean diplomat in Beijing, the defector said. Mr. Ri, the foreign minister, was the most senior North Korean official to have been reported as “purged” in the wake of the breakdown of Mr. Kim’s talks with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Han was executed in February 2019 on charges of spying for