N Korea general feared purged as Kim makes mark

North Korea’s top military official — a key mentor to new leader Kim Jong-un — has been removed from all posts because of illness, state media said in a surprise announcement that shakes the core of the authoritarian country’s power structure.

Ri Yong Ho had looked healthy in recent appearances, and his departure fed speculation that Kim purged him in an effort to put his own mark on the nation he inherited seven months ago when his father Kim Jong-il died. At the same time, there was no sign of discord at Ri’s last public appearance barely a week ago.

The decision to dismiss the 69-year-old from top military and political posts was made at a Workers’ Party meeting, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. It was not immediately clear who would take Ri’s place.

Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea analyst at the International Crisis Group, was sceptical of the illness claim, in part because of Ri’s recent apparent health. He also said Ri won his major promotions at a Sep 2010 party conference but received none in April, which stirred speculation about his future.

“There’s a very high probability that it wasn’t health issues, but that he was purged,” said Pinkston.

The state of North Korea’s million-man army, one of the world’s largest, is followed closely in South Korea, which stations many of its more than 600,000 troops along the world’s most heavily armed border, and in Washington, which keeps more than 28,000 troops in South Korea.

North Korea has recently threatened to attack South Korea’s president and media, angry over perceived insults to its leadership and US-South Korean military drills Pyongyang says are a prelude to an invasion. A North Korean artillery attack in 2010 killed four South Koreans and raised fears of war.