General Secretary Kim Jong Il was present there.

Also present there were senior officials of the party, the army and the state, officials of the party and armed forces organs, ministries and national institutions, servicepersons of the Korean People's Army, officials in the fields of science, education, culture and arts, public health and media, anti-Japanese revolutionary fighters, bereaved families of revolutionary martyrs, those who had the honor of being received by the President, those related to his revolutionary activities, heroes, persons of merits and working people in Pyongyang, overseas Koreans and the chief of the Pyongyang mission of the Anti-imperialist National Democratic Front.

The participants in the service observed a moment's silence in memory of the President.

Kim Yong Nam, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea and president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, made a memorial address.

In his memorial address he said that Kim Il Sung was a peerlessly great man whom the Korean people greeted and held in high esteem for the first time in the history spanning five thousand years, the founder of socialist Korea, the father of the nation and the eternal sun of Juche.

He went on:

The President was an outstanding thinker and theoretician who founded the immortal Juche idea and clearly indicated the way to be followed by the times and revolution, a legendary hero who started the Songun revolutionary cause of Juche and saved the destiny of the country and the nation with arms of revolution and an invincible and iron-willed commander who ushered in a new era of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The President was a distinguished statesman who built the socialist state centred on the popular masses for the first time in history and laid a solid foundation for the eternal prosperity of the country and the nation, a lodestar of national reunification who showed the most correct way of national reunification and worked his heart and soul to achieve it till the last moments of his life and a universally recognized political elder who made a great contribution to accomplishing the cause of global independence.

His revolutionary life was a great life of the genuine leader of the people and tender-hearted father who made a history of the warmest love and dedication to the people, guided by his noble idea of believing in people as in Heaven.

His brilliant life and feats will last forever along with the eternal prosperity of the country and the nation and the victorious advance of the cause of human liberation and he will always be alive in the hearts of the army and people of the DPRK and humankind.

His revolutionary idea and cause are being successfully carried forward and accomplished by Kim Jong Il in all fields, the speaker noted, underscoring the need to wage a dynamic struggle to build a great prosperous and powerful socialist nation and thus translate the desire of the President into a brilliant reality, make a hundred-year history of Kim Il Sung's Korea a history of prosperity to be always recorded in the history of the country and bring earlier the reunification of the country and the final victory of the revolutionary cause of Juche.

The WPK and the army and people of the DPRK will take firm hold on the revolutionary idea of the President as the eternal guiding idea and embody it in all fields, preserve and develop the undying revolutionary traditions established by him and his feats as the treasures of eternal value of the country and the nation generation after generation and thus eternally glorify the history of the Korean revolution as his glorious revolutionary history and the history of the victory of the Juche idea, the Songun idea, the speaker declared, underlining the need to decisively shatter the anti-reunification moves of the U.S. imperialists and the south Korean puppet clique, successfully materialize the three charters for national reunification and thereby surely achieve the historic cause of national reunification.

He called for developing the foreign relations in the idea of independence, peace and friendship and making a positive contribution to building an independent and peaceful new world.

Memorial services were solemnly held in provinces, cities, counties and complexes today on the same occasion.