South Korea says it foiled assassination plot by North

SEOUL -- Two North Korean assassins planning to kill the highest-ranking communist official to defect to Seoul have been arrested, South Korea's government said Wednesday.

The announcement was made hours before South Korean President Lee Myung-bak toughened his stance over the sinking last month of one of his country's warships, killing 46 crew members. .

After weeks of appealing for calm until the cause of the incident is determined, Lee said Wednesday that the sinking should counter South Koreans' complacency about their northern neighbor.

"North Korea, the world's most belligerent force, lies very close," he said in a speech that stopped short of blaming the communist state for the sinking. Experts are examining the hull, which was shattered by an explosion.

Compounding the perception of an imminent threat from the North, the South's intelligence service and prosecutors gave a rare public account of a foiled plot.

They said two North Korean army majors defected through Thailand, arriving in South Korea in January and February. But inconsistencies were found in their stories, and the men said under interrogation that they intended to kill Hwang Jang Yop, 87, a former chairman of North Korea's legislature, the Supreme People's Assembly.

"The men tried to kill themselves during the interrogation session," said a spokesman for Seoul prosecutors.

Since defecting in 1997, Hwang has been a thorn in the side of North Korea, publicly condemning the nuclear-armed dictatorship of Kim Jong Il. In recent months, he has traveled to Washington and Tokyo to share his views on strategic thinking in Pyongyang.

Complaining about such trips, North Korea's Uriminzokkiri Web site warned Hwang that "traitors have always been slaughtered with knives." But Pyongyang did not comment on the allegation that it had sent assassins to kill him.

Hwang was seen as an architect of North Korea's ideology of juche, loosely meaning "self-sufficiency."

The recent tension is a blow to Lee, who is trying to style South Korea, Asia's fourth-biggest economy, as a stable investment destination. South Korea is head of the Group of 20 leading economies this year and will host a summit in November.

North Korea has a record of assassinating its opponents abroad. The wife of South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee was fatally shot in 1974. Seoul says that Kim personally ordered the killings of several members of South Korea's government in Burma in 1983 and the destruction of a civil airliner in 1987, killing 115.

Recent tensions on the peninsula have focused on North Korea's nuclear tests and exchanges of fire between warships in the Yellow Sea. The financial markets have generally accustomed themselves to such flash points.

South Korea's Defense Ministry has suggested that the North could have sunk its warship with a mine or torpedo. North Korea denies responsibility.

-- Financial Times