SEOUL, South Korea — Since being dispatched from North Korea to London as a foreign service officer, Thae Yong Ho had developed some very un-North Korean tastes, friends say. He enjoyed playing tennis and dining on Indian curry, activities only available to a tiny elite in North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated countries.
Despite growing comfortable with his posting to North Korea’s embassy in suburban London, Thae chose to leave that life behind and defect with his wife and children to South Korea, in what could be one of the highest-profile defections in years, South Korean authorities said.
The South Korean media has been abuzz this week with speculation over a possible defection by Thae, after the Joongang Ilbo newspaper reported Tuesday that a high-ranking North Korean diplomat working in the United Kingdom had sought asylum in another country.
An official from South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, its body for relations with North Korea, said by phone on Wednesday that Thae had arrived in South Korea and is now in state custody with his wife and children. The official declined to specify the date of Thae’s arrival, and spoke on condition of anonymity, citing ministry rules.
The news of Thae’s arrival in South Korea comes one day after the South Korean government announced that a group of 13 North Korean restaurant staff who defected in April as a group from China had been released from state custody after lengthy rounds of questioning.
The North Koreans had been working at one of the many restaurants North Korea operates abroad, mostly in Asia, where young waitresses dressed in traditional attire serve traditional North Korean food and drinks, while also providing live musical entertainment.
While more than 1,000 North Koreans arrive in the South every year and a total of more than 29,000 are registered here, defections by overseas diplomats and government officials are rare. The most high-profile case came in 1997 when Hwang Jang Yop, a close associate of founding leader Kim Il Sung, defected to the South.
Madden didn’t expect much reaction from the North Korean state to Thae’s defection. “If there is an immediate response it will be along the lines of accusing someone of kidnapping this man and demanding his return, or conversely implicit reference in state media to traitors or enemies of the leadership,” Madden wrote in an email.
Thae had last drawn attention when he was spotted last year in London attending an Eric Clapton concert with Kim Jong Chol, older brother of Kim Jong Un.
Evans said he would regularly meet with Thae when he took trips back to London, and found Thae to be well adjusted to life there, writing: “He seemed so British. He seemed so at home.”
He still found Thae’s defection a surprise, writing that despite his fondness for life in Britain, Thae always seemed committed to North Korea. “He had never given any hint of disloyalty to the regime, not a flicker of doubt,” Evans wrote.