North Korea has today marked what would have been Kim Jong Il’s 70th birthday with a large military parade in the country’s capital, according to Mirror.

Flowers and pictures of the late Dear leader adorned Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang as hundreds of senior officials, military leaders and citizens followed to pay their respects to the dictator, who died of heart failure in December last year. New leader, Kim Jong Il’s youngest son Kim Jong Un, looked on solemnly before bowing before a large portrait of his father.

Outside the palace, thousands of North Korean soldiers lined up in neat rows on a sunny but cold day, listening to speeches praising the Kim family. Later, the new leader and other officials watched as a parade of soldiers marched by, followed by military vehicles and trucks carrying artillery guns and rocket launchers.

Fireworks exploded, military music boomed and people waved artificial pink and red flowers. At Kim Il Sung Square, the main plaza in the capital, North Koreans bowed and laid flowers, including red "kimjongilia" begonias, at a portrait of Kim Jong Il hanging on the Grand People's Study House.

The memorial could serve as closure to North Korea's mourning ahead of important nuclear talks next week with the United States, said John Delury, an assistant professor at Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies in South Korea.

Since Kim Jong Il's funeral nearly two months ago, North Korea's leadership and state media have cast him as a strong but benevolent leader, while praising Kim Jong Un as the unquestioned choice to succeed him in this socialist nation of 24 million.

Kim Jong Il ruled with an iron fist for 17 years, a period that included a famine in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of people and protracted tensions over the nation's drive to build nuclear weapons. Food shortages persist in North Korea and relations with South Korea are at their lowest point in years. However since Kim's death, expressions of mourning and adoration have been common in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il's death halted discussions between Pyongyang and Washington on much-needed food aid in exchange for nuclear disarmament. North Korea has tested two atomic devices since 2006.