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.
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