A little known civil defense group has now publicly taken responsibility for the North Korean embassy raid in Madrid last month.
The raid took place on 24 February, and was reported by international media only 72 hours after it occurred, following local news reports. According to Spanish Foreign Ministry sources, during the raid, ten men bound and gagged embassy staff then four hours later drove off with computers and other documentation. What was most intriguing about the incident was that it took place only days before the failed summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Now, over a month after the fact, a mysterious resistance group has claimed they were behind the attack.
The so-called Cheollima Civil Defense Group (CCD) recently posted a statement on their website, taking responsibility for the raid. Named after the mythical winged horse commonly portrayed in Asian mythology, Cheollima Civil Defense is an organization self-described as a group assisting political dissidents within PRK and actively seeking the overthrow of the Kim regime.
While there is no evidence as of yet to back up any of their claims, Choellima’s side of the story is quite intriguing.
The statement makes the point of clarifying first and foremost that the raid was “not an attack” (according to CCD, no one was beaten or bound, contrary to official reports) but, rather, an intelligence-gathering operation. CCD allegedly gathered “information of enormous potential value” which it subsequently “shared with the FBI.”
Cheollima beseeches the reader to not have any sympathy for embassy officials as North Korean “embassies around the world […] are not like the traditional diplomatic, commercial, and cultural outposts of legitimate governments” but rather “hubs of illicit narcotics and arms trafficking, [and] mediums for the furtherance of propaganda of a totalitarian regime.” CCD finished by declaring PRK an “incorrigible regime” and that any efforts of the West to negotiate with it will be futile. “It may take some more months of political theater to realize Pyongyang is once again acting with treachery,” the statement indicated.
Now that CCD has laid bare its activities, it will be interesting to see how much of an influence their “operations” will have on continuing diplomatic efforts on the Peninsula. By releasing the “valuable information” it allegedly holds, will the group succeed in further undermining the current reconciliation process?
