WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — There is “no reason to doubt” that North Korea’s army chief of staff was executed, a US State Department official said yesterday following reports of the death.

   “This is, again, par for the course in North Korea, that you’ve got a leader who carries out purges of his Cabinet, or of his Administration periodically,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, but stopped short of confirming an execution.

   South Korean media reported Wednesday that Ri Yong-Gil, chief of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) General Staff, had been executed earlier this month for forming a political faction and corruption.

   “We’ve seen it, as you said, before, so we have no reason to doubt that this is the case this time — that this individual was killed, executed,” Toner said.

   Reports — some confirmed, some not — of purges, executions and disappearances have been common since Kim Jong-Un took power following the death of his father Kim Jong-Il in December 2011.

   The US Government, which has no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, did not “have much visibility” on the execution’s broader implications for the North Korean regime, Toner said.

   The report of the execution comes at a time of highly elevated tensions on the divided Korean peninsula following the North’s recent nuclear test and longrange rocket launch.

   US Secretary of State John Kerry has said a nuclear-armed North Korea poses an “overt threat, a declared threat to the world”.

   The top US diplomat tried to convince China in January to put more pressure on its North Korean ally and to hammer out a UN Security Council resolution to impose new sanctions against Pyongyang.