Trump Disputes Report That North Korea Official Was Executed

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said a North Korea official who was reported to have been executed really wasn’t.

Speaking to reporters at Shannon Airport in Ireland on Wednesday, Trump took issue with a report in South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper that said North Korea executed its former top nuclear envoy to the U.S. and four other foreign ministry officials in March after a failed summit between Kim Jong Un and Trump.

“One of the people they were talking about that was supposedly executed wasn’t executed at all,” Trump said without naming the person.

Kim Hyok Chol, who led working-level negotiations for the February summit in Hanoi, was executed by firing squad after being charged with espionage after allegedly being co-opted by the U.S., the newspaper said Friday, citing an unidentified source. The move was part of an internal purge Kim undertook after the summit broke down without any deal, it said.

But the official is actually alive and in custody, CNN has since reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

“It’s an interesting situation,” Trump said Wednesday. “I think that they would like to make a deal and we’d like to make a deal with them -- we’ll see how it goes. It’s been going pretty well because there hasn’t been testing of anything major, and frankly there’s been no nuclear testing in a long period of time.”

Talks between the U.S. and North Korea have stalled since the Vietnam summit, in which the two sides failed to reach a deal on how to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear program. There are no plans to get negotiations back underway, though the U.S. says Trump will continue to seek talks.

Tensions have risen since the summit, with each side blaming the other for the failure to reach a deal. Kim, who conducted missile tests last month in a move seen as violating United Nations sanctions, has given Trump until the end of the year to ease sanctions choking his state’s moribund economy.

--With assistance from Justin Sink.

To contact the reporter on this story: Margaret Talev in Washington at mtalev@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum, Larry Liebert

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