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A South Korean fisheries official who went missing this week was questioned in North Korean waters before being shot and killed by troops who then doused his body in oil and set him on fire, the South Korean military said.
South Korea’s military said evidence suggested the man was attempting to defect north when he was reported missing from a fishing boat on Monday about 10 kilometers south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL).
The NLL is a disputed demarcation of military control that acts as the de facto maritime boundary between the two Koreas.
The exact reason the 47-year-old official was shot is unknown, but North Korean troops may have been acting on anti-coronavirus orders, the South Korean military said.
Citing intelligence sources, the army said the unidentified man appeared to have been questioned at sea north of the NLL before being executed on “order of a higher authority.”
Troops wearing gas masks doused the body with oil and set it on fire.
The military said that yesterday they sent a message to the North across the land border demanding explanations, but have not yet received a response.
“Our military strongly condemns such atrocity and strongly demands that North Korea explain and punish those responsible,” General Ahn Young-ho, in charge of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing.
The US military commander in South Korea said this month that North Korean troops had received “shoot-to-kill orders” to prevent the coronavirus from entering the country.
In July, a man who had defected to South Korea three years ago sparked a coronavirus scare when he crossed the heavily monitored border into North Korea, which he says has had no cases of the disease.
His arrival prompted North Korean officials to shut down a border city and quarantine thousands of people for fear that he may have had the coronavirus, although the World Health Organization later said its test results were inconclusive.
Last week, South Korean police arrested a defector who they said had tried to return to North Korea by breaking into a military training site in the South Korean border city of Cheorwon.
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