North Korea has promised to sentence the former South Korean president to death for organizing the assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un

North Korean authorities have announced that they will sentence former South Korean President Park Geun-hye to death for organizing an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The message of the power departments of the DPRK was distributed by the state news agency TsTAK.

The same punishment awaits the former head of the South Korean National Intelligence Agency (NAR), Lee Byung Ho, said in the DPRK.

The report said that Park Geun-hye had been planning an operation to change the leadership of North Korea since 2015.

“The South Korean authorities, in accordance with the international convention, must immediately hand over to [the DPRK] a pack of traitor Park Geun-hye and the head of the puppet intelligence service, Lee Byung-ho, who committed the largest state terrorist crime,” the Russian-language message of the KCNA said.

Representatives of the NAR, in a comment to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, called the accusations of preparing an assassination attempt baseless and said they would not tolerate threats against South Korean citizens.

The fact that Park Geun-hye in 2015 authorized intelligence to develop a plan to remove Kim Jong-un from power in the DPRK was reported on June 26 by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, citing a source. According to the newspaper, the plan included the possibility of killing Kim; it was allegedly supposed to be framed as an accident so as not to provoke an armed conflict between the two states.

• In May 2017, the DPRK authorities announced that they had uncovered a plan to assassinate Kim Jong-un, prepared by the CIA with the participation of South Korea. Intelligence agencies allegedly managed to detect a "group of terrorists" who planned to poison the North Korean leader with "biochemical substances, including radioactive substances and nano-poisons."
• Park Geun-hye was removed from power as a result of a corruption scandal involving her closest friend Choi Sun-sil, who, according to the investigation, effectively controlled her work and had access to classified information. In March, Park was arrested.