A top aide to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has died in a car crash, state news agency KCNA has said.<\/p>\n
Kim Yang-gon, 73, was a secretary of the ruling Workers’ Party and was in charge of ties with South Korea.<\/p>\n
He was part of a high-level delegation from North Korea that helped ease a stand-off with the South in August, after an exchange of artillery fire.<\/p>\n
The state news agency called him Kim Jong-un’s “closest comrade and a solid revolutionary partner”.<\/p>\n
“Comrade Kim Yang-gon, a Workers’ Party secretary and member of the party Central Committee Politbureau… died in a traffic accident at 6:15am, Tuesday, at age 73,” KCNA said, without giving details.<\/p>\n
It added that Kim Jong-un would lead an 80-member state funeral for Mr Kim on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Tension between North and South Korea increased in August when a border blast injured two South Korean soldiers.<\/p>\n
Meetings at that time eventually led to the two countries stepping away from a military confrontation.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A top aide to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has died in a car crash, state news agency KCNA has said. Kim Yang-gon, 73, was a secretary of the ruling Workers’ Party and was in charge of ties with South Korea. He was part of a high-level delegation from North Korea that helped ease […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":177986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-177985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/177986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}