leader of the North Korean military. Mu Chong and a number of other military leaders were expelled from the party and Mu was forced to return to China where he spent the rest of his life. Kim Il-sung also removed Pak Il-u, the Minister of the Interior and reputedly the personal representative of Mao Zedong. The sacking of Hegay, Mu and Pak reduced the influence of the Chinese and Soviet factions, but Kim Il-sung could not yet launch an all out assault on these factions because he would risk the intervention of Moscow and Beijing when he was still dependent on their support. Purge of the "Domestic faction" As the Korean War drew to a close, Kim Il-sung first moved against the Domestic faction. While the Soviet faction had the sponsorship of the Soviet Union, and the Yanan faction was backed by China, the Domestic faction had no external sponsor who would come to their aid, and was therefore in the weakest position. With the end of the Korean War, the usefulness of the Domestic faction in running guerilla and spy networks in South Korea came to an end. Former leaders of the Workers Party of South Korea were attacked at a December 1952 Central Committee meeting. In early 1953, rumours were spread that the "southerners" had been planning a coup. This led to the arrest and removal from power of Pak Hon-yong (who was foreign minister at the time) and Yi Sung Yop the minister of "state control" who was charged with "spying on behalf of the United States". In August 1953, following the signing of the armistice that suspended the Korean War, Yi and eleven other leaders of the domestic faction were subjected to a show trial on charges of planning a military coup and sentenced to death. In 1955, Pak Hon-yong, the former leader of the WPSK and deputy chairman of the WPK, was put on trial on charges of having been a US agent since 1939, sabotage, assassination, and planning a coup. He was sentenced to death, although it is unclear if he was shot immediately or if his execution occurred some time in 1956. The trials of Yi and Pak were accompanied by the arrest of other members and activists of the former SWPK, with defendants being executed or sent to forced labour in the countryside. The domestic faction was virtually wiped out, though a