LAST UPDATE | 18 Jul 2023
A US CITIZEN who entered North Korea “without authorisation” during a tour of the heavily fortified border and is believed to be detained is a US soldier, officials said.
North and South Korea remain technically at war since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, with a Demilitarized Zone running along their border.
“A US service member on a JSA orientation tour willfully and without authorisation crossed the Military Demarcation Line” into North Korea, spokesman Colonel Isaac Taylor said in a statement, referring to the Joint Security Area north of Seoul.
A US official previously told AFP on condition of anonymity that the American national was a soldier who is now believed to be in North Korean custody.
CBS News reported that the soldier was a low-ranking member of the US Army who was being escorted home to the United States for disciplinary reasons, but somehow managed to leave the airport and join the tour group.
Troops from both North and South Korea face off at the Joint Security Area, a popular tourist destination that is toured by hundreds of visitors on the South Korean side every day.
Soldiers from both sides face off at the JSA north of Seoul, which is overseen by the United Nations Command.
It is also a popular tourist destination, and hundreds of visitors every day tour the area on the South Korean side.
Former US president Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Panmunjom Truce Village in 2019 and even stood on North Korean soil by stepping across the demarcation line there.
“Panmonjom is the most likely site this American chose to cross into North Korea because it’s the only location one could attempt such a move out of the whole JSA tour,” Choi Gi-il, a professor of military studies at Sangji University told AFP.
South Korea’s SBS television station reported that the person who crossed the border was a US army soldier.
South Korea’s defence ministry declined to comment when contacted by AFP.
North Korea sealed its borders at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and has yet to reopen. Since, its security presence on its side of the border has also been significantly scaled back.
When AFP toured the JSA earlier this year, no North Korean guards were visible in the area. However, under armistice protocols, South Korean or US personnel could not run across the border to retrieve the US national.
Retired US Army Lt. Col. Steve Tharp, who worked in the JSA area, told Seoul-based specialist site, NK News, that he had no idea how the North Koreans would react to the incident as there was “so little data out there” about events like this.
“This is the first contact since COVID… We don’t know what they’re thinking,” he told NK News.
The incident comes as relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points, with diplomacy stalled and Kim calling for increased weapons development, including tactical nuclear weapons.
Seoul and Washington have ramped up defence cooperation in response, staging joint military exercises with advanced stealth jets and US strategic assets.
Today the allies held the first Nuclear Consultative Group meeting in Seoul and announced an American nuclear submarine was making a port visit to Busan, for the first time since 1981.
The move is likely to trigger a strong response from North Korea, which baulks at having US nuclear assets deployed around the Korean peninsula.
Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of Kim Jong Un, said yesterday that such actions would only “make the DPRK go farther away” from possible talks.
Despite ongoing hostilities between the two sides, the JSA in Panmunjom is typically peaceful.
In 1976, two American soldiers were killed in the JSA by North Koreans with axes in a dispute over a tree.
The last time there was a defection at the JSA was in 2017, when a North Korean soldier drove a military jeep and then ran on foot across the demarcation line at Panmunjom.
He was shot multiple times by his fellow North Korean soldiers as they sought to prevent his escape, but after hours of surgery, he survived.
In general, defections between the two Koreas are rare, but far more common in the other direction, when North Koreans seek to escape grinding poverty and repression by fleeing, typically across the northern land border into China.
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