North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was believed to be visiting key ally China yesterday, possibly with his youngest son and presumed successor, officials, media reports and Chinese residents said.

The apparent trip, which was not confirmed by either Beijing or Pyongyang, dashed hopes of a meeting with former US president Jimmy Carter who is on a mission to North Korea to try to win the release of a jailed American.

“Judging from circumstances, Chairman Kim might have left for China early yesterday morning,” a senior South Korean official said on condition of anonymity.

Residents of Jilin in northeastern China said a delegation had visited the city yesterday amid tight security.

The trip – which would be Mr Kim’s second to China this year – comes amid increasing speculation about Mr Kim’s successor and efforts by Beijing to revive North Korean nuclear disarmament talks despite high tensions on the peninsula.

Analysts in South Korea said Mr Kim was seeking to obtain China’s blessing for his successor, widely expected to be his youngest son Kim Jong-Un, and gain desperately needed economic assistance from its main source of aid.

They also suggested that Mr Kim’s departure for China while Mr Carter was in Pyongyang meant the North considered it too early to seek a breakthrough in tense relations with the US.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said Mr Kim might be accompanied by Kim Jong-Un, 27, who is expected to be named to the ruling North Korean party leadership at a rare meeting next month.

The meeting would represent “a landmark of an epochal turn in strengthening the party,” the North’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said yesterday.

Speculation about the succession has intensified since Kim Jong-Il, now 68, suffered a stroke in August 2008, but he has since recovered sufficiently to work.

“Kim may have decided to tackle this issue in person as China has yet to reach an understanding about the succession at a time when the nuclear issue has not yet been resolved,” Professor Yang Moo-Jin of the University of North Korean Studies said.

Yonhap quoted an official at South Korea’s presidential office as saying that Mr Kim crossed into China at about midnight Wednesday on his personal train.

In Jilin, a resident said the group visited a school yesterday that had been attended by Mr Kim’s father and former North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung as a boy.

“They arrived in the morning. There were many police in the streets and the roads were blocked,” a woman who works at a restaurant adjacent to the Yuwen Middle School said.

Yonhap quoted a diplomatic source in Beijing as saying the delegation was expected to stay at the five-star Crystal Hotel in Jilin. It was unclear whether they would travel to Beijing.

Pyongyang and Beijing have made it a rule not to confirm Kim’s trips to China, which he last visited in May and met President Hu Jintao.

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