SEOUL, North Korea may attempt to mobilize its spies or sympathizers in South Korea to stage a terrorist attack on the South in a manner similar to attacks by Islamic Jihad, an expert said Wednesday.

Cho Han-bum, a senior research fellow at the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) said North Korea is expected to raise military tensions as its leader Kim Jong-un defined inter-Korean ties as relations “between two states hostile to each other” at a year-end party meeting.

“With Kim’s announcement, North Korean spies and sympathizers in South Korea could work as ‘wartime’ agents to engage in activities commensurate with a state of war,” Cho told a forum on the two Koreas’ relations.

He raised the possibility of North Korean espionage agents staging a terrorist attack in South Korea on orders from North Korea, or of South Koreans with pro-North Korean stances staging a “lone-wolf” terrorist attack.

During a key parliamentary meeting last month, the North’s Kim also dubbed South Korea his
country’s “primary foe” and called for revising the constitution to codify a commitment to “completely occupying” South Korean territory in the event of war.

Oh Gyeong-seob, director at the planning and coordination division at KINU, said the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s spy agency, is expected to intensify its espionage operations against the South and step up cyber attacks.

Chung Sung-yoon, a senior research fellow at the think tank, said he could not completely exclude the possibility that North Korea could use tactical nuclear weapons against South Korea in a preemptive manner, such as a potential attack on South Korean nuclear power plants in a worst-case scenario.

He also dismissed the chance that Pyongyang could stage a full-blown war on the Korean Peninsula as “near zero,” saying that the country seems to be more interested in “institutionalizing” its military cooperation with Russia.

In recent years, North Korea has repeatedly reaffirmed its stance against all sorts of terrorism.

N
orth Korea has a track record of staging terror attacks against South Korea in the past few decades, including the 1987 midair bombing of a South Korean airliner near Myanmar that killed all 115 people aboard.

The attack prompted the United States to put North Korea on its terrorism blacklist, but Washington removed Pyongyang from the list in 2008 to facilitate talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

In 2017, the U.S. redesignated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Source: Yonhap News Agency