A militant Korean
nationalist has slashed the face of the US ambassador to South Korea at a
breakfast meeting in Seoul, but the envoy was not seriously hurt.
Mark Lippert, 42, was also cut on his left hand, with blood spattered over the breakfast table.
Security officers subdued the attacker, one pinning him down with a shoe on his neck, until he was arrested.
The North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said he had delivered a "knife shower of justice".
The attacker, named as Kim Ki-jong, 55, appears to have
broken his ankle during the attack and was taken away on an ambulance
trolley after questioning.
South Korean police, who are in the process of obtaining
warrants to search his home, are seeking to establish whether he has
close ties with the North, the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Seoul.
Mr Lippert had hospital treatment but later wrote in a tweet: "Doing well and in great spirits... Will be back ASAP to advance US-ROK [Republic of Korea] alliance!"
US President Barack Obama called his ambassador to wish him "the very best for a speedy recovery", a US official said.
Nobody believes that pro-North Korean groups represent a majority of
South Koreans but they are still a significant minority and part of the
political landscape.
In November, South Korea's constitutional court ordered that
the Unified Progressive Party be dissolved even though it had five
members elected to parliament. The authorities said the UPP posed a
threat to South Korean democracy. One of its leaders was jailed.
The counter-argument of the leftist nationalists is not so
much that they want to be ruled by Pyongyang or fall under a North
Korean system but that the American military presence in South Korea
perpetuates a division within one people - the Korean people.
The strong feelings of pro-Pyongyang activists become most
obvious when anti-Pyongyang activists launch balloons into the North
loaded with propaganda messages. The two sides confront each other, with
much jostling and shouting. There was a small pro-US demonstration
after the attack on the ambassador but some on the streets of the
capital said they applauded it.
The US state department said it strongly condemned the incident
which South Korean President Park Guen-hye described as an "attack on
the South Korea-US alliance".
A small group of South Koreans held a protest against the
attack outside the hospital where Mr Lippert was treated, waving
placards which read "Mark Lippert, Cheer up!" and "Korea-US relationship
is solid".
Eighty stitches
The attack happened at about 07:40 (22:40 GMT Wednesday), as the ambassador was at a performing arts centre in central Seoul.
It took 80 stitches to close the ambassador's facial wound,
which was 11 cm (just more than 4 in) long and 3 cm deep, doctors said.
The cut did not affect his nerves or salivary gland, hospital spokesman Chung Nam-sik said.
Lew Dae-hyun, a plastic surgeon at Yonsei University's
Severance Hospital, said Mr Lippert had narrowly escaped having much
more serious injuries.
"If the cut had been one to two centimetres deeper than it is
now, it could have damaged the carotid on the upper neck, which could
have turned it into a serious emergency situation," he said. "It could
have been life-threatening."
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