North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, is suffering from life-threatening cancer of the pancreas, South Korean television reported today. It is the latest indication of a leadership crisis in the isolated and nuclear armed dictatorship.

The report, attributed to unidentified Chinese and South Korean intelligence sources, comes the week after Mr Kim appeared at an auditorium in Pyongyang looking haggard, emaciated and slow on his feet. According to Yonhap Television News, the cancer was diagnosed last summer, around the same time as he disappeared from public view for three months.

A Japanese television station ran a vaguely sourced report over the weekend that also said that Mr Kim was suffering a “serious pancreatic disorder”. But such is the totalitarian character of the North Korean dictatorship that it is very difficult to corroborate such stories, and to distinguish plausible rumour from fact.

South Korean government spokesmen denied any detailed knowledge of the state of Mr Kim’s pancreas today. However, other evidence does suggest that, 15 years after he succeeded his father, North Korea is contemplating a future without the man officially called the "Dear Leader".

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Kim Il Sung today named Mr Kim Jong Il, his son, as his political successor

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He disappeared from public view for three months last August after what foreign intelligence agencies assumed was a stroke. Since then, judging by his appearance in television footage, his health has declined.

Still photographs showing him visiting military units last November appeared to have been doctored to insert old images of a healthy Mr Kim into more recent pictures. In April, he appeared at the inauguration of the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s tame parliament, looking thin and drawn.

But last week, at a ceremony to commemorate the 15th anniversary of his father’s death, he looked even more haggard, with signs of a limp which may be a lingering effect of his stroke.

The tenor of North Korea’s interactions with the outside world also suggests a country focused on inward power politics rather than external engagement. All year, Pyongyang has staged a series of verbal and physical provocations, including the launch of an intercontinental rocket and an underground nuclear test, which suggest that it has abandoned expectations of negotiation with the international community.

Last month, his oldest son, Kim Jong Nam, confirmed what had been the stuff of unconfirmed reports for weeks — that his youngest brother, Kim Jong Un, 25, had been designated as his father’s successor. Their father may be flaunting the country’s military power in an attempt to appeal to military hardliners whose support is necessary for the succession.

Less convincing reports suggested that the young Mr Kim had visited Beijing to introduce himself to the leadership of China, the closest thing that North Korea has to an international friend.

Over the years, there have been countless stories about the ill health of Mr Kim, most of them completely inaccurate and often put about by South Korean intelligence in an attempt to undermine the North Korean regime. If Mr Kim is terminally ill then this information would be a state secret which would not readily leak out of the inner chambers of power in Pyongyang.

If the North Korean official media is to be trusted, the past few weeks have been unusually active ones for Mr Kim. In the first half of the year he was said to have made 77 “field guidance” trips to offer personal advice at factories and farms, compared with 49 during the same period last year — not the schedule of a dying man.

Caner of the pancreas is difficult to treat and, partly because it is often diagnosed late, survival rates are low. Only a fifth of patients with the disease survive one year after diagnosis, and fewer than one in twenty survive five years.

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