South Korea's intelligence agency says North Korea's former Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho has been purged. But it stopped short of explaining why he had been purged, or whether he had been executed.

South Korean lawmakers made the disclosure following a debriefing by the National Intelligence Service during a closed-door parliamentary committee session on Thursday.

Ri was North Korea's chief negotiator at the six-party talks on the country's nuclear program.

He became foreign minister in 2016, and engaged in negotiations with then US President Donald Trump's administration over Pyongyang's nuclear development.

Ri has remained out of the public eye since it became known in 2020 that he had been replaced as foreign minister.