North Korean leader's wayward son back home-report

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

SEOUL, Aug 27 (Reuters) North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's eldest son has returned to Pyongyang after living overseas and taken up a post at the ruling Workers' Party, possibly signalling a shift in succession plans, a news report said today.

Kim Jong-nam, 36, had been living in Macau for the past few years. In 2001, he was deported from Japan for trying to enter the country on a fake passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland and was thought to have fallen out of his father's favour.

However, Jong-nam has taken a post at the party's powerful Organisation and Guidance Department, a division where his father began work in government in 1964 and later headed, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted an intelligence source as saying.

The portly Jong-nam was caught on camera in Beijing in February, where he said he was on his way back to Pyongyang for his father's birthday. It was never confirmed whether he actually boarded a flight to Pyongyang, the South Korean daily said.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service declined to comment on the report.

Some experts on the secretive North - the world's only communist dynasty - have said there had been little movement involving leader Kim's three known sons to suggest any of them was being groomed for leadership.

Others said Kim, 65, favoured one of his two younger sons.

Succession plans are one of the most closely guarded secrets in the reclusive state. Many expert said if Kim Jong-il were to suddenly die, he would most likely be replaced in a collective leadership comprised of government and military elite.

Kim Jong-il himself was 32 at the time he was in effect picked to succeed his father Kim Il-sung in 1974 by being elected secretary to the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, the formal name of the North Korean labour party.

REUTERS RN ND0834

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