North Korea has described a senior diplomat who defected to the South as "human scum", claiming he had been wanted for a number of crimes.

Thae Yong Ho's move was announced by South Korea's Unification Ministry on Wednesday, saying that he had arrived in the city with his family.

He had been North Korea's deputy ambassador in London.

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In the North's first official response, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Mr Thae had been ordered to return home in June to be investigated for a series of crimes.


The alleged offences include embezzling government funds, leaking confidential secrets and sexually assaulting a minor.

KCNA said Mr Thae "should have received legal punishment for the crimes he committed, but he discarded the fatherland that raised him and even his own parents and brothers by fleeing, thinking nothing but just saving himself, showing himself to be human scum who lacks even an elementary level of loyalty and even tiny bits of conscience and morality that are required for human beings".

It also accused Seoul of using Mr Thae's defection to insult the North Korean leadership.

Plus it denounced the British government for allegedly rejecting demands to extradite him back to North Korea.

It claimed Britain had tainted its image as a law-abiding country by "handing over the fugitives without passports to the South Korean puppets".

Sky's Defence Correspondent Alistair Bunkall, who had been on first name terms with the diplomat, says he always "came across as fiercely dedicated to Pyongyang, the ruling Workers' Party and the leadership of Kim Jong Un".

Mr Thae is the highest-ranking diplomat ever to defect to South Korea.

In 1997, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt resettled in the United States.

Technically, the North and South remain at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

According to the South Korean government, more than 29,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since then.

Pyongyang often accuses the South of kidnapping, or enticing its citizens to defect.