SEOUL (AFP) — South Korea's main spy agency Friday denied involvement in an alleged plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, after Pyongyang's claims of an assassination attempt fuelled cross-border tensions.
The communist state said Thursday it had arrested a man who tried to conduct a "terrorist mission" against Kim under orders from a South Korean intelligence agency.
"It has nothing to do with the National Intelligence Service," a spokesman for the NIS told AFP.
A South Korean rights campaigner who says he worked with the arrested man denied any attempt to kill the leader.
The allegations come at a time of increasingly frosty relations.
On December 1 the North expelled hundreds of South Korean workers from the Kaesong joint industrial estate and imposed strict border controls, in protest at what it called Seoul's confrontational policy.
The North's State Security Ministry said a man surnamed Ri had been detained while carrying out a "terrorist mission given by a South Korean puppet intelligence-gathering organisation to do harm to the safety of the top leader of the DPRK (North Korea)."
The ministry said Ri crossed the border early this year and came into contact with an representative of a South Korean spy agency surnamed Hwang.
It said the agency sent him back to the North after training him to gather information about Kim's official visits.
"The organisation also sent him speech and acoustic sensing and pursuit devices for tracking the movement of the top leader and even violent poison in the end," said the statement, carried by state media.
The state of Kim's health is being closely watched after US and South Korean officials said he suffered a stroke around mid-August.
Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of the US Pacific command, said Thursday the 66-year-old remains in control of his government.
Relations with the government of South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak have reached an extremely dangerous phase, the North said.
The conservative leader has linked major economic aid to progress in the North's denuclearisation, a stance that enrages Pyongyang.
Activist Choi Sung-Yong, who has helped rescue kidnapped South Koreans from the North, said Ri and Hwang had worked with him.
Choi told AFP that Ri was a North Korean security official in the northwestern city of Sinuiju and Hwang was an ethnic Korean in China. They were arrested in late 2006 or early 2007.
"It is true that they passed various information to me but they were never involved in such a plot (to kill Kim)," Choi said, adding they passed on military information and copies of state documents.
Choi said the South's spy agency was not involved.
"North Korea appears to be using the case for political purposes to strengthen its ideological grip on people," he said.
"Probably my work might have provoked them," Choi added, referring to his involvement in launching balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border.
Choi said he heard that Ri had been executed and Hwang had been paralysed due to ill treatment. He said he had sent mobile phones and other equipment to the two as well as sleeping pills -- not poison.
The North also said it also foiled an bid by agents to collect soil, water and leaf samples to check for nuclear activity, as well as attempts to incite defections and form an underground church.
International nuclear disarmament talks are stalled over the North's refusal to permit the taking of such samples to check its atomic activities.
Analysts said the claim of a plot against Kim was highly unusual.
"The North is likely to use these alleged incidents as a pretext to heighten tension," Baek Seung-Joo of the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses told AFP.
Yang Moo-Jin, of the University of North Korean Studies, also said ties would worsen.
"The North is saying in effect only enmity remains with the current South Korean government as it attempted to hurt our Dear Leader," Yang said, predicting a further clampdown on the Kaesong estate.
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