The 66-year-old man in the photos appeared the picture of health, full of vigor despite reports he underwent brain surgery less than two months ago.

He was surrounded by serious, crisply uniformed soldiers and in the background there was plenty of verdant greenery, more reminiscent of summer than mid-autumn in a temperate clime.

To seasoned North Korea watchers, the country’s weekend release of photos of leader Kim Jong Il for the first time since the middle of August are raising a host of questions about his health - as well as the motive and timing behind their publication. The images came less than a day before the United States on Saturday removed North Korea from Washington’s terrorism blacklist, dousing rising tensions over North Korea’s nuclear development.

Kim had disappeared from public view in mid-August, just when Pyongyang stopped dismantling its nuclear program in anger with the United States over its refusal to delist the North, a long coveted demand of the country’s communist regime.

“They didn’t appear to have been taken recently,” Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said on Monday of the pictures carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. “To me, it looked like they were taken in June or July.”

Sporting his trademark dark shades and khaki jumpsuit, Kim was shown inspecting a military unit. He viewed troops in training, clapping and talking to them while looking around their barracks dotted with red-and-white slogans urging loyalty to him.

They were the first photos of the “Dear Leader,” as he is known in North Korea, available since Aug. 14. That is the date around which Kim — believed to have long had diabetes and heart disease — suffered a stroke and then underwent brain surgery, according to South Korean and US officials.

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