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SEOUL: North Korea has executed a top financial official blamed for a bungled currency revaluation that triggered chaos in the communist state, South Korean news reports said Thursday.
Pak Nam-Ki, who was earlier reported sacked as chief of the communist party's planning and finance department, was shot dead last week at a military range in Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency said.
Pak, 77, was charged with ruining the national economy as a "son of a big landowner", Yonhap said, quoting sources familiar with events in the North.
The news agency said many North Koreans believe he was made a scapegoat for the revaluation, which fuelled inflation and worsened serious food shortages.
Munhwa Ilbo newspaper carried a similar story. South Korea's unification ministry and the National Intelligence Service (NIS) could not confirm the reports.
"If the report is true, it proves the regime is now desperate to placate its people," said Dongguk University professor Kim Yong-Hyun.
"The regime appeared to have needed a scapegoat," he said, recalling the case of former agriculture ministry director Seo Gwan-Hee, who was publicly executed in 1997 after being held responsible for a famine.
The redenomination last November 30 forced people to swap old banknotes for new at a rate of 100 to one, but restricted the amount that could be exchanged.
It was widely seen as another attempt to crack down on the burgeoning free-market economy, but backfired disastrously according to numerous reports.
Savings were wiped out, prices soared and distribution networks were disrupted, aggravating hunger. NIS chief Won Sei-Hoon has been quoted as saying that the revaluation sparked riots which were later suppressed.
The regime was forced to suspend its campaign to shut down private markets and the prime minister made a rare apology for the chaos.
Yonhap said the regime executed Pak as public anger had derailed a propaganda campaign to promote ailing leader Kim Jong-Il's youngest son Jong-Un as eventual successor.
"All the blame has been poured on Pak after the currency reform failure exacerbated public sentiment and had a bad effect" on the succession plan, one source was quoted as saying.
Kim, 68, suffered a stroke in August 2008. Some analysts say Pyongyang is waiting for the right opportunity to officially announce Jong-Un as successor.
Pak was one of Kim Jong-Il's close associates and frequently accompanied the leader on his trademark "field inspections" outside Pyongyang. He had not been mentioned by official media since early January.
- AFP/sc
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