A North Korean man has crossed the heavily fortified land border with South Korea and is now being held in custody, the South Korean military has confirmed.
The unarmed individual was located on Thursday in the central-west section of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), before being guided by South Korean troops to safety, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Seoul’s army carried out “a standard guiding operation to secure custody”, a process that involved a considerable number of soldiers, it said.
After the North Korean was detected early on Thursday morning, the task of bringing him to safety took about 20 hours to complete, the Joint Chiefs of Staff added.
He was mainly still during the day, with South Korean soldiers approaching him at night, it noted.
Seoul has not commented on whether it viewed the border crossing as a defection attempt.
There were no immediate signs of unusual military activity in North Korea, the South Korean army said.
Crossing between the two Koreas is relatively rare and extremely risky, as the border area is strewn with mines.
It is more common for defectors to first travel across North Korea’s border with China, before heading on to South Korea.
Last August, a North Korean soldier reportedly defected to the South and was taken into custody in the northeastern county of Goseong.
And then in April, South Korean troops fired warning shots after roughly 10 North Korean soldiers briefly crossed the military demarcation line. Pyongyang’s officers returned to their own territory without returning fire, Seoul said.
The crossing on Thursday comes a month after the liberal politician Lee Jae-myung was elected as the new 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”.
“Politics and diplomacy must be handled without emotion and approached with reason and logic,” he said on Thursday. “Completely cutting off dialogue is really a foolish thing to do.”
As part of his attempt to rebuild trust with his neighbour, Lee has banned loudspeaker broadcasts at the border and attempted to stop activists flying balloons with propaganda into North Korea.
However, it remains to be seen whether Kim will cooperate.
In response to Yoon’s decision to strengthen military alliances with Washington, DC, and Tokyo, Kim called South Korea his country’s “principal enemy” last January.
Diplomatic efforts have stalled on the Korean Peninsula since the collapse of denuclearisation talks between Washington and Pyongyang in 2019 during the first US President Donald Trump administration, after a series of Trump-Kim summits, globally watched spectacles that bore little concrete progress.
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