Son of highest-profile South Korean defector also moves to North Korea to follow 'dying wishes' of his parents

The son of the highest-profile South Korean to defect to North Korea has arrived in the North to permanently resettle.

The news has been released by North Korean state media and if confirmed, it would be an unusual case of a South Korean defecting to the impoverished, authoritarian North.

The state-run Uriminzokkiri website reported that Choe In-guk, who is aged in his 70s, arrived in the capital, Pyongyang, on Saturday to "dedicate the rest of his life to Korean unification at the guidance of leader Kim Jong-un".

The website published photos and a video showing a bespectacled Mr Choe in a beret reading his arrival statement at Pyongyang’s airport.

Mr Choe said he decided to live in North Korea for good because it was his parents’ "dying wishes” for him to “follow” North Korea and work for its unification with South Korea, according to a written statement published on the website.

Mr Choe is the son of former South Korean foreign minister Choe Dok-shin, who defected to North Korea with his wife in 1986, years after he was reportedly embroiled in a corruption scandal and political disputes with then-South Korean president Park Chung-hee. He died in 1989.

Some analysts say North Korea accepted Choe In-guk so it could use him as a propaganda tool to tell its citizens its system is superior to South Korea’s.

North Korea is struggling to revive its economy and improve people’s livelihoods since the United States has not agreed on major sanctions relief until it takes significant steps toward nuclear disarmament.

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South Korea’s Unification Ministry said Choe In-guk was in North Korea without special permission from the Seoul government to visit the North.

Ministry spokesperson Lee Sang-min told reporters that authorities were trying to determine details about Mr Choe’s travel to North Korea.

The two Koreas, split along the world’s most heavily fortified border for about 70 years, bar their citizens from visiting each other’s territory and exchanging phone calls, letters or emails without special permission.

Under a South Korean security law, people who secretly visit North Korea can face up to 10 years in prison.

Since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea to avoid political repression and economic poverty.

South Koreans have occasionally defected to North Korea in the past, but it has become a rarity in recent years, especially since the North suffered a crippling famine in the mid-1990s that is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

A small number of South Koreans suffering economic hardship at home have gone to North Korea to live in past years, but North Korea is known to have repatriated such people.

The Unification Ministry said North Korea returned two South Koreans who entered North Korea last year, but it did not elaborate.

Before his 1986 defection to North Korea, the senior Choe had lived in the United States for about a decade and was a vocal critic of Park, who ruled South Korea with an iron fist from 1961 to 1979.

He was previously Park’s foreign minister and ambassador in West Germany.

In North Korea, he was made vice-chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, which deals with relations with South Korea, and chairman of the Central Committee of the Chondoist Chongu Party, a political group affiliated with a Korean native religion called “Chondo”.

He once headed the Chodo church in South Korea.

His wife, Ryu Mi Yong, also took a series of high-profile jobs, including membership in the presidium of the North’s rubber-stamp parliament and chairwoman of the Central Committee of the Chondoist Chongu Party.

When she died at the age of 95 in 2016, a public funeral was organised and her body was buried along with her husband’s at Pyongyang’s Patriotic Martyrs’ Cemetery.

According to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, Choe In-guk was allowed to make 12 authorised trips to North Korea since 2001 for events such as visiting his parents’ cemetery and attending a death anniversary for his mother.

It was not immediately known how he went to North Korea, but South Korean media speculated he flew from Beijing with a North Korean government-issued visa.