North Korean leader takes new wife

SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has taken a musician-turned-secretary as his new wife after his former spouse died of cancer two years ago, a report said on Sunday.

Kim Ok, 42, lived with the reclusive North Korean leader who turned 64 in February after serving as his private secretary, Seoul's Yonhap news agency said quoting an unnamed government source.

"She is virtually North Korea's first lady," said the source who Yonhap called a Seoul government source privy toinformation on Kim Jong-Il's family

Kim Ok, a piano major at Pyongyang University of Music and Dance before becoming Kim Jong-Il's secretary in the early 1980s, has since accompanied the North's leader to trips at home and abroad, the source said.

"She is a cute woman rather than a beauty," the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I heard she is very wise and clever."

The reclusive leader has often been described by outside media as having a playboy lifestyle of wine and women despite the chronic poverty of his people.

Pyongyang has never made public Kim Jong-Il's marital status, but he is believed to have had three wives, South Korean and Japanese media reports said.

Kim was married to Ko Yong-Hui, a former dancer who died of breast cancer in August 2004; Sung Hae-Rim, a former actress who died of heart disease in Moscow in 2003; and Kim Young-Sook in the 1970s, according to the reports.