North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has got married, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said on Wednesday quoting North Korean TV.
North Korean TV has recently shown footage of Kim at several events with an unidentified young woman, sparking speculation of a romance.
The media said the woman’s name was Ri Sol-ju. According to reports, Kim and his wife on Wednesday attended a ceremony to mark the completion of a recreational park on Pyongyang’s Rungna islet.
Georgy Toloraya, director for Korean Programs at the Institute of Economics, said the news of the marriage clearly illustrated a shift towards transparency in the Communist state’s domestic policy. The two previous North Korean leaders rarely appeared in public with their wives.
“It’s yet another illustration of the fact that Kim Jong-un’s administration policies have clearly taken a new direction: [toward] greater transparency, greater contact with the people, an attempt to limit the power of the military,” he said.
He said that as the state media did not reveal any details of the ceremony, the wedding apparently took place some time ago.
Another expert on North Korea, Konstantin Asmolov said that “no drastic changes have taken place in North Korea so far.”
Asmolov, who is a senior researcher at the Center for Korean Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies, said the domestic policy shift rumors were just another example of “myths” that “journalists invented and then refuted.”
“For some time North Korea was surrounded by certain myths and any information that didn’t fit was rejected. And now people are suddenly trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and link it all to the recent transition of power.”
Kim Jong-un became leader of the North Korean Workers' Party and head of state following the death of his father Kim Jong-il in December 2011.
Kim Jong-il, who died from heart problems aged 69, took over from his father Kim Il-sung, founder of the DPRK, in 1994.
