Kim Jong-un's spies from Belarus found in Ukraine

• 8.06.2012, 11:03

They worked in Belarus before moving to Dnipropetrovsk.

Two citizens of North Korea, who tried to get access to state secrets, were sentenced in Ukraine, Segonya newspaper reports with a link to theprosecutor's office.

Ryu Songjel and Lee Taekil worked at a North Korean trade representative in Belarus, the source reports. Having arrived in Ukraine from Belarus, they tried to recruit an employee of Yuzhnoye Design Bureau (a bureau in Dnipropetrovsk designing satellite and rockets), investigators say. They wanted to obtain secret information relating, in particular, to “aircraft fuel systems”.

The design bureau member reported about the foreigners to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). The SBU organized an operation and detained the Korean citizens (the spies were arrested as they were photographing classified researches in aerospace technologies).

Investigators think the information the spies wanted to have “would allow to increase the action range of North Korean nuclear missiles to target the territory of the United States”, the newspaper notes.

Before the trial, Ryu Songjel and Lee Taekil were held in SBU's pretrial detention facility in Kyiv. Each of them was sentenced to 8 years in prison.