SEOUL, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- North Korea has delayed a major party congress in a possible sign of unresolved succession issues, a Seoul government source said Saturday.
The communist regime had announced that the first top-level meeting of the Workers' Party in decades would be held in early September, but it seems to have been postponed, a South Korean government source told the Yonhap News Agency.
Some had expected Kim Jong Il, 68, to use the meeting to certify his third son, Kim Jong Un, 27, as his successor.
"There is the possibility that the issues of publicly anointing Kim Jong Un as the heir and personnel appointment for the son's patrons could not be sorted out," the source told Yonhap on condition of anonymity.
On Wednesday, the South's unification minister, Hyun In-taek, said the apparent postponement of the party gathering was due to floods in the North.
In a 1980 congress, the party announced Kim Jong Il's succession to his father, Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il took over when his father died in 1994.
