South Korea says it has taken a North Korean soldier into custody after he crossed the country’s heavily guarded border.
The soldier crossed the military demarcation line (MDL) that divides the peninsula on Sunday, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which said it “tracked and monitored” the soldier before securing him.
South Korea’s military said it would investigate the circumstances of the soldier’s crossing – a relatively rare incident in the mine-strewn border zone between the two nations still technically at war.
South Korean media described the crossing near the central part of the border as a “defection”, with the Chosun Ilbo daily saying the soldier expressed his wish to defect after being approached by a South Korean soldier.
If confirmed, the soldier would join tens of thousands of North Koreans who have fled poverty and repression in North Korea since the peninsula was split by war in the 1950s. Last year, 236 North Koreans arrived in the South, with women accounting for 88 percent of the total.
The last time a soldier from North Korea, which derides defectors as “human scum”, escaped to the South was in August last year.
Most defectors, however, take a different route – escaping across North Korea’s border with China before eventually making their way to the South. Direct crossings between the two Koreas are relatively rare and extremely risky, as the border area is full of mines and well-monitored on both sides.
Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said the latest soldier who crossed the border may have been able to navigate the dangerous terrain due to his “likely familiarity with the area”.
“The latest crossing will not be received positively by Pyongyang, as he could provide the South with information on its troop movements and operations in the border area,” the analyst told the AFP news agency.
In July, a North Korean civilian crossed the border by foot in a 20-hour operation aided by the South’s military.
The latest crossing came four months after liberal politician Lee Jae-myung took office as South Korean president, following months of political chaos, which began with the conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol’s short-lived attempt to impose martial law in December.
Lee has taken a different stance from his predecessor on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, promising to “open a communication channel with North Korea and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula through talks and cooperation”.
Diplomatic efforts have stalled on the Korean Peninsula since the collapse of denuclearisation talks between Washington and Pyongyang in 2019 during the first United States President Donald Trump administration, after a series of Trump-Kim summits, globally watched spectacles that bore little concrete progress.
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