N. Korea to send Workers' Party secretary to Kim DJ's funeral: KCNA

SEOUL, Aug. 19 (Yonhap) -- North Korea will send a secretary of its ruling
Workers' Party to Seoul Friday to pay respects to the late former South Korean
President Kim Dae-jung, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said
Thursday.

"Upon authorization of Kim Jong Il, chairman of the DPRK National Defence
Commission, a special envoy group led by Kim Ki Nam, secretary of the Central
Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, will visit Seoul from August 21 to 22
to mourn over the death of ex-President Kim Dae Jung," the KCNA said in a
one-sentence dispatch from Pyongyang.
Kim died of pneumonia and its complications Monday at 85. A state funeral will be
held Sunday at the National Assembly in central Seoul.
He had a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim in June 2000, the first ever
inter-Korean summit since the separation of the two Koreas after the peninsula's
liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, to produce rapprochement measures.
hdh@yna.co.kr
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