NORTH KOREA: A top North Korean defector said he had heard from the communist state's leader, Mr Kim Jong-il, and his aides that it had developed nuclear weapons, a local newspaper reported.
Mr Hwang Jang-yop, the former secretary of the North Korean Workers' Party who defected to Seoul in 1997, said Mr Kim and his close lieutenants had told him the North conducted underground nuclear weapons-testing in 1991, the Korea Times reported.
"The North has fortified itself with weapons of mass destruction, therefore it is virtually impossible to finish any war quickly with conventional weapons," Mr Hwang said at a seminar at the National Assembly. He is the highest-ranking North Korean to defect to Seoul.
Meanwhile, four North Korean teenagers slipped into the British consulate in Shanghai yesterday and requested political asylum.
Two other men from the impoverished Stalinist state fled to South Korea by boat yesterday, a rare case of direct defection.
Most refugees arrive in the South through third countries after crossing North Korea's relatively open border with China.
A rights group source identified the asylum-seekers in Shanghai as two boys and two girls, aged 15 to 17, who fled from North Korea to north-east China between 1999 and 2000.
The group met reporters in Beijing on Thursday. "When I was in North Korea, I had corn meal three times a day and rice on my birthday," Choe Il (15), one of the boys, said. "You are considered rich if you eat like that," he added.