Kim Shin-Jo, North Korean command who tried to kill the leader of South Korea, dies

Kim Shin-Jo, the only member captured of a team of 31 North Korean Commandos who arrived a short distance from the South Korean presidential palace in the center of Seoul before being rejected in 1968, died on Wednesday. He was 82 years old.

The death of Mr. Kim in a nursing hospital was confirmed on Thursday by his Church of Sungrak in Seoul, who mentioned old age as a cause.

In January 1968, Mr. Kim and his colleagues made the unimaginable-inspired by unnoticed through the strongly fortified border between North Korea and the South and 40 miles to Seoul on a mission to assassinate Park Chung-Hee, who at the time was the military dictator of South Korea and his staff. They arrived hundreds of meters from the presidential blue house of Mr. Park, but were stopped by the South Korean forces in a ferocious battle of weapons.

All North Korean killers were killed or killed if not two. It was believed that one of the two had returned to the north. The other was Mr. Kim, who surrendered and subsequently reinvented himself in an fiery anti -communist teacher and Christian shepherd in the southern capitalist.

“We came to the throat of the president of Flet Park Chung-Hee”, Signor Kim saidShortly after his capture.

The Commandos raid in the heart of Soul on January 21, 1968 – e Seizure of North Korea Of the American reconnaissance ship USS Pueblo two days later – marked one of the tops of the tensions of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula uniform.

He affected the attack, the government of Mr. Park secretly trained its killers to take revenge on the then North leader Kim Il-Sung, the grandfather of the current leader Kim Jong-un. (The unit was dissolved after the Commandos South Korean mutiny In 1971.) South Korea also created a reserve and introduced army Military training in high schools and universities. The 13 -digit residential identity card, introduced at the time to help protect against North Korea spies, remains mandatory to date for all South Koreans aged or over 17 years old.

Part of the mountain route behind the blue house that Mr. Kim’s Raid party used to infiltrate the South Korean capital remained closed to the public for safety reasons until a few years ago.

“If our mission had succeeded, now the South Koreans will live under communism,” Kim said in an interview in 2008.

Korea was divided in North Pro-Soviet and in the South Pro-American at the end of the Second World War. Their three -year -old Korea war was interrupted in 1953, leaving them technically in war since then. In the following decades, both sides led a clandestine war, with Thousands of commando and spies infiltrating The mutual territory. Mr. Kim’s fallen companions remain buried in a “Enemy cemetery“North of Seoul, not claimed by their government, which officially denies both their mission and existence.

In 1968, Kim’s team violated a section of the Western Intecorean border supervised by American troops. As they rushed through the hills to Seoul, the North Koreans met four South Korean brothers who collected firewood. After many debates, they let the South Koreans live, warning them not to contact the police. That was their fatal mistake.

The inhabitants of the village warned the police and when the aspiring killers reached Seoul, the police were waiting for.

A ferocious battle of firearms broke out CookedA steep hill behind the Blue House, which was the headquarters of the South Korean presidency until the former President Yoon Suk Yeol moved his office to another government building in 2022. The fighting and the manhunt continued for two weeks while the North Korean raid party spread and retired north. More than 30 South Koreans have been killed.

Mr. Kim hid in an abandoned hut, surrounded by South Korean troops and ready to kill himself with a grenade. He changed his mind and surrendered.

“I was single, a young man. I wanted to save myself,” he said In an interview in 2010.

North Korean spies often captured in the south dedicated to decades in solitary confinement in South Korean prisons. Some of them refused to deny their communist ideology, in part because it would have endangered their families in the north. But after two years of interrogation, Mr. Kim was pardoned. He successfully supported that he had not killed any South Korean and also denied communism.

South Korea has seen the value of propaganda in converts such as Mr. Kim. Shortly after his release, he traveled through South Korea with counterintelligence officials, keeping conferences in military unit, churches and workplaces in which he blocked himself against the North Korean government. He said that the deserters of his native nomite nomite, Chongjin, told him that his parents had been executed and that his brothers had disappeared.

“In North Korea, my dead colleagues are heroes and I am a traitor,” he said during the 2008 interview.

Mr. Kim was survived by his wife, Choi Jeong-Hwa, who met in South Korea and who transformed him to Christianity. Mr. Kim was ordained Pastore in 1997. He was also survived by a son and a daughter.