SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean man defected to communist North Korea by crossing the heavily fortified frontier, Pyongyang's state media reported Tuesday — but it didn't say how he navigated a no man's land where guards can shoot to kill.
If confirmed, the case would be a rare instance of a South Korean defecting to the impoverished North, though thousands have defected from North Korea to the South in recent years.
Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said the 30-year-old man crossed into North Korea on Monday and was in the country's "warm care."
KCNA did not say how he was able to cross the Demilitarized Zone, which is guarded by hundreds of thousands of combat-ready troops on both sides. The 2.5-mile-wide (4-kilometer-wide) DMZ is also strewn with land mines and laced with barbed wire.
South Korean guards are authorized to shoot to kill anyone caught in the zone who cannot provide the correct password, a spokesman for South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday. (...)
The report said the man, identified as Kang Tong Rim, had harbored a "longing" for North Korea and tried to defect several times while serving mandatory South Korean military service between 2001-2003.
"He is pleased with the accomplishment of his desire for defection," KCNA said.
South Korea's military and National Intelligence Service spy agency said they were checking the KCNA report, which was monitored in Seoul.
Originally posted by world_king377: must have been a spy
Concur
Todays politics remind me of an old saying. - "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?" - Joseph Stalin
Certainly we can all well imagine how hordes of South Koreans cannot wait to flee the South with its freedoms, quality of life, wealth, etc. There must be millions in the South, just hoping to find utopia in the North, with its near complete lack of freedom. its spartan lifestyle (impoverished at best), and wealth only for the chosen few. Aside from my tongue-in-cheek comments, this military defector, if he indeed was, is in for a rude awakening.
The last known American soldier to defect to North Korea was PFC White back in the early 1980s. After the North Koreans got all the propaganda crap use out of him he supposedly drown while swimming.....in the middle of Winter?!! When I use to pull DMZ duty there we use to collect propaganda leaflets from both sides and keep or trade them like baseball cards. PFC White was worth two or three North Korean Propaganda leaflets of the Great Dear Leader of Kim Il-sung.
