Kim Jong Un Aunt Killed Herself Last Year, Says Report

FILE - In this July 27, 2013 photo, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves to war veterans during a mass military parade celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice in Pyongyang, North Korea. From "Saturday Night Live" on Oct. 11, 2014 spoofs to the wild theories of journalists across the globe trying to parse his five-week absence from the public eye, the 30-something leader of North Korea has captured as many headlines as he did when he threatened to nuke his enemies last year. This bewildering ability to command attention by doing nothing says a lot about the North’s total mastery of a propaganda apparatus that puts Kim at the center of everything. AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File

The aunt to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un killed herself in 2013, according to a report from a prominent defector.

The defector, Kim Heung-kwang, left North Korea to South Korea in 2004. According to his sources inside the communist country, he said that the leader’s aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, killed herself in December 2013 via poisoning.

She committed suicide just a few days after high-level official Jang Song Thaek, who was considered Kim Jong Un’s right-hand man at one point, was executed.

Kim Kyong Hui, who is the sister of former leader Kim Jong Il, hasn’t been seen publicly in North Korean media since last year.

“They would never do that to somebody who was still alive,” Kim told the Wall Street Journal. “She didn’t have the will to live,” he said.

Meanwhile, it was reported North Korean students will have to complete a three-year course on leader Kim Jong Un in secondary school.

The students already spend about 160 hours studying North Korean founder Kim Il Sung and 148 hours on second leader Kim Jong Il, but they'll also have to spend another 81 hours completing courses on the current leader.

“The North already has such courses on its founder, Kim Il Sung, his first wife Kim Jong-suk and their son, Kim Jong-il,” reads a report in South Korea’s KBS World Radio.

“The classes are being taught based on materials distributed by the Workers’ Party of Korea and focus on Kim’s birth and early life,” it adds. “The North has yet to produce textbooks but the classes are also said to be teaching Kim’s quotes, theses and orders he gave to the ruling party and military.”