Women held handkerchiefs to their faces as they wept and filed past an enormous portrait of a smiling Kim Jong Il hanging on the Grand People’s Study House, in the spot where a photograph of Kim’s father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, typically hangs.
Kim Jong Il died of a vast heart attack Saturday, consistent with state media, which reported his death on Monday. They said he was sixty nine — though some accounts place his age at seventy.
A huge crowd of mourners converged on Kim Il Sung square with ancient white mourning flowers in hand. the group grew throughout the day, at the same time as significant snow fell, and some mourners took off their jackets to shield mourning wreaths created in Kim’s honor, slightly below the spot where he stood last year waving to crowds at the large military parade where he introduced his successor, Kim Jong Un.
Two medical staff rushed to carry away a lady who had fainted.
“We chose to return here to care for voters who might faint due to sorrow and mental strain,” Jon Gyong Song, 29, who works as a doctor during a Pyongyang medical center, told The Associated Press. “The flow of mourners hasn’t stopped since Tuesday night.”
South Korean intelligence reports, meanwhile, indicated Wednesday that North Korea was consolidating power behind Kim’s untested son, believed to be in his late 20s.
Worries around Northeast Asia have risen sharply as Kim Jong Un rises to power during a country with a one.2-million troop military, ballistic missiles and a complicated nuclear weapons development program.
South Korea has place its military on high alert. In another sign of border tension, Chinese boatmen along a river separating North Korea and China told the AP that North Korean police have ordered them to stop giving rides to tourists, saying they will hearth on the boats if they see anyone with cameras.
Along the Koreas’ border, the world’s most heavily armed, South Korean activists and defectors launched large balloons containing tens of thousands of propaganda leaflets, a move possible to infuriate the North. some of the leaflets opposed a hereditary transfer of power in North Korea. Some showed graphic footage of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s battered corpse and described his gruesome death.
Kim Jong il Il ruled the country for seventeen years after inheriting power from his father, national founder and eternal North Korean President Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994. Kim Jong Un only entered the general public view last year and remains a mystery to most of the world.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service believes the North is currently targeted on consolidating Kim Jong Un’s power and has placed its troops on alert, consistent with South Korean parliament member Kwon Young-se.
South Korean military officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to policies that restrict touch upon intelligence matters, said North Korea has ordered its troops to be vigilant but that it didn’t mean they were being moved.
Lawmaker Kwon said the NIS told the parliamentary intelligence committee that senior military officers have pledged allegiance to Kim Jong Un, which a lot of security officers are deployed in major cities across the country. Intelligence officers declined to comment.
The NIS additionally gave its predictions on how the North’s government will work throughout the transition of power to the younger Kim.
It told lawmakers that a billboard hoc committee is anticipated to handle key state affairs before Kim Jong Un formally becomes the country’s leader, consistent with lawmaker Hwang Jin-ha, who additionally attended the closed-door briefing. Intelligence officers didn’t describe how they got the data, he said.
The NIS predicts that Kim Kyong Hui, a key Workers’ Party official and Kim Jong Un’s aunt, and Jang Song Thaek, her husband and a vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission, will play larger roles supporting the heir, the lawmaker said.
A South Korean Defense Ministry official handling North Korea affairs, however, said there's too little data to make a confident judgment about where North Korea’s power transition is heading.
Initial indications out of North Korea recommend the facility transition to the son has been moving forward, though it remains unclear when Kim Jong Un will formally take power.
In 1994, Kim Jong Il declared a three-year mourning amount following his father’s death, becoming the official leader of the state in 1997.
Kim Jong Un led a procession of senior officers Tuesday during a viewing of Kim Jong Il’s body, which is being displayed during a glass coffin close to that of Kim Il Sung. Publicly presiding over the funeral proceedings was a crucial milestone for Kim’s son, strengthening his image as the country’s political face at home and abroad.
According to official media, quite 5 million North Koreans have gathered at monuments and memorials in the capital since the death of Kim Jong Il.
Hundreds of thousands visited monuments around the city among hours of the official announcement that Kim had died.
The North has declared an 11-day amount of mourning that will culminate in his state funeral and a national memorial service on Dec. 28-29.
The leaflets sent into North Korea on Wednesday by South Korean activists are a sore purpose with the North, which sees them as propaganda warfare. North Korea has previously warned it might hearth at South Korea in response to such actions. there have been no immediate reports of retaliation, however. South Korean activists vowed to continue sending leaflets.
Reporting from Pyongyang by Associated Press television News senior video journalist Rafael Wober and AP reporter Pak Won Il. AP writers Foster Klug, Hyung-jin Kim, Sam Kim and Eric Talmadge in Seoul, AP photographers Andy Wong in Dandong, China, and Lee Jin-man in Imjingak, South Korea, also as Korea bureau chief Jean H. Lee contributed to this story.
