By Alex Jensen
SEOUL
Seoul prosecutors indicted three alleged methamphetamine traffickers Sunday, in what a prosecutor described as a "groundbreaking" case.
The South Korean suspects are accused of smuggling the highly addictive drug from North Korea.
“It is the first time North Korean agents were found to have been involved in the production of methamphetamine, although there have been rumors North Korea tried to get foreign currency by selling meth,” the prosecutor was quoted as saying by local news agency Yonhap.
The suspects were allegedly contacted by a North Korean agent in 1996.
They are then suspected of producing 70 kilograms of meth in the North’s Hwanghae Province in 2000 - although there is reportedly no evidence of the drug being sold in the South.
South Koreans are officially barred from travelling to North Korea without permission - the two countries remain technically in a state of conflict, as they never signed a peace treaty after the 1950-53 Korean War.
Despite widespread claims that North Korean meth has made its way into China and the United States, Pyongyang has in the past denied such activities.
“The illegal use, trafficking and production of drugs which reduce human beings into mental cripples do not exist [in North Korea],” the North’s state news agency said in 2013.
Last year, a report published by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea asserted that Pyongyang has been producing illegal drugs since the 1970s as a form of finance.
One of the three suspects also stands accused of working with Pyongyang in a plot to assassinate former North Korean Workers’ Party secretary Hwang Jang-yop.
Hwang defected to South Korea in 1997, but died of natural causes in 2010.
