Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s reclusive and much lampooned leader, failed to attend a big military parade for the first time yesterday, as reports emerged that he may have suffered a crippling stroke.

The parade, traditionally a showpiece for North Korea’s arsenal, was held to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the impoverished communist state.

In place of the usual phalanx of tanks and missiles, a much reduced artillery display trailed through the streets under the eyes of North Korea’s titular number two, Kim Yong Nam, while the regular army, navy and air force stayed away. It was the first major parade that Mr Kim had missed since becoming Commander-in-Chief in 1991.

The absence of the “Dear Leader”, North Korea’s supreme dictator, came amid growing speculation that he was seriously ill; an unnerving development in an unstable and paranoid state with a penchant for nuclear technology but no clear plan for succession.

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Mr Kim took over power from his father Kim Il Sung — the “Great Leader” — in 1994; the first dynastic succession in the communist world, although his father remains “Eternal President”, the only dead person to hold such office. The younger Mr Kim has three sons with two different mothers, Jong Nam, 37, Jong Cheol, 27, and Jong Woon, 25, but has never named or even hinted at a successor.

An American intelligence official said yesterday in Washington that Mr Kim was believed to have suffered a stroke in the past two weeks, while a respected South Korean newspaper reported that its country’s Embassy in Beijing had been told by Chinese intelligence that Mr Kim collapsed on August 22.

“It does appear that Kim Jong Il has had a health setback, possibly a stroke,” the American official said. The event was said to have happened in ”the last couple of weeks” but there had been no outward signs of a struggle to succeed him since. Mr Kim was last seen in public last month.

Chosun Ilbo, the South Korean newspaper, reported at the weekend that five Chinese doctors had been in North Korea for more than a week, possibly to treat Mr Kim.

Mr Kim’s health has been the subject of intense speculation since he took power. Heavy drinking and a taste for rich foods and cigars have been blamed for alleged health problems ranging from diabetes to heart disease.

Last October he made an unprecedented attack on the rumours of his failing health, describing the claims as the work of “novelists, not reporters”. “The South Korean media reported that I have diabetes and even heart disease but that is not the case at all,” he snapped.

This month Toshimitsu Shigemura, a veteran Japanese expert on North Korea, claimed in a book that Mr Kim had died from diabetes in 2003 and that his role had been played since by one of the doubles used to guard him against assassination. That would mean that world leaders from Vladimir Putin to Hu Jintao had been negotiating with an impostor as they tried to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Professor Shigemura credits the lack of substantive policy decisions in five years of disarmament talks to his theory of Mr Kim’s demise.

South Korean analysts who attended two summits with Mr Kim — before and after his supposed death — reported that he had changed appearance but said that this was because he had lost weight, quit smoking, given up cognac in favour of claret and coaxed the rest of the politburo on to a healthy diet.

Kim Jong Il was formally named as successor at the Sixth Communist Party Congress in 1980, eight years after his father first began delegating much of the running of government to him. With the backing of the military, the succession was uncontested.

By 1994, when Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack, North Korea was in almost total isolation, crippled by huge military expenditure and ravaged by famine caused by agricultural failure. His death was not announced for 34 hours. Kim Il Sung’s funeral in Pyongyang was attended by hundreds of thousands of people, many mourning in extraordinarily dramatic fashion, weeping and crying his name during the state funeral procession. His embalmed body was placed in a glass coffin and put on display in a public mausoleum where it remains today.

Opinion is divided over whether one of Mr Kim’s three sons will succeed him or whether a top military figure will take control. Mr Kim’s reluctance to name one of his sons as a successor is credited to their manifest unsuitability for leadership because of their reputations as over-indulged playboys.

Kim Jong Cheol is regarded by analysts as the least-worse choice. He is the only heir who has been receiving lessons on succession.

Under North Korea’s complex constitution, Kim Yong Nam, 80, shares the office of the presidency with the “Dear Leader” but in reality his job is that of a foreign policy technocrat, more diplomat than leader. He is not expected to join the race for succession.

Rise of a dictator

— Kim Jong Il was born in Siberia in 1941 when his father Kim Il Sung was in exile

— According to official propaganda he had written operas and plays by the age of 23

— He is suspected of engineering a 1983 Rangoon bomb attack, killing several members of the South Korean Cabinet, and the bombing of a South Korean airliner in 1987

— He ordered the kidnap of a South Korean director and his favourite actress in 1978 to improve North Korean cinema

— He became leader in 1994

— In 2000 he met the South Korean President, Kim Dae Jung, in an historic summit

— Rumours circulated that he died in 2003 and was replaced by a double

Source: Times archives

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