North Korean Minister shot over currency house

(Kim Jong-Il)

North Korea executed a former top finance official last week, holding him responsible for the country's currency reform fiasco that has caused massive inflation and worsened food shortages.

Pak Nam-gi, who was reportedly sacked in January as chief of the planning and finance department of the ruling Workers' Party, was executed at a shooting range in Pyongyang, but many people world wide believe he was made a scapegoat for the botched revaluation.

Pak, a 77-year-old technocrat, was charged with "deliberately ruining the national economy" as a "son of a big landowner," the sources told Yonhap News Agency.

Yonhap said the regime executed Pak as public anger had derailed a propaganda campaign to promote ailing leader Kim Jong-Il's youngest son Jong-Un as eventual successor.

Pak Nam-gi

Ministry of Planning and Finance of North Corea

Pyongyang

Kim Jong-Il

Kim Jong-Un