When North Korea broke a three-week silence on leader Kim Jong Un's public activity on Saturday, it offered no clue where he has been during a period of intense global speculation about his health and whereabouts.
Instead, state media simply showed him surrounded by aides and appearing confident at a gleaming fertiliser factory that is believed by outside experts to be part of a secret nuclear-weapons programme.
The sprawling complex is the result of Kim's vision to build a modern factory that will support agricultural production and make progress in automating its chemical industry, Pak Pong Ju, a party elder and a loyal aide to Kim, said at the ribbon-cutting where Kim reappeared. His second public visit this year to the site 50 km north of the capital Pyongyang included a sizeable audience of officials from the army, the ruling Workers' Party and the local community. Many wore face masks in an apparent precaution against the coronavirus.
The pair had accompanied Kim on his last major field guidance, the March groundbreaking of the General Hospital in Pyongyang.
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