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SEOUL: A North Korean defector wore a diving suit and fins during a daring six-hour swim around one of the world’s most fortified borders, a Seoul official said, and was captured only after apparently falling asleep.
Clumsy South Korean forces failed to detect the man’s daring feat even though he appeared several times on CCTV after landing and set off alarms, drawing strong criticism from the media and opposition members of parliament.
Even after his presence was noted, the man, who used scuba gear to navigate his way through the sea around the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the peninsula, was not captured for another three hours.
The man, apparently in his 20s, landed north of the city of Goseong on the east coast.
“He had presumably been swimming for about six hours, wearing a padded jacket over a diving suit and fins. His clothing seemed to have kept him warm and allowed him to stay afloat,” Yonhap told an anonymous Joint Chiefs of Staff official. news agency on Tuesday (February 23).
The tidal currents worked in his favor, the official said, and he abandoned most of his equipment before running through a drainage channel under the barbed wire fences that run along the shoreline.
For more than three hours, surveillance cameras captured him eight times, audible alarms sounded twice, but border guards did not notice.
Finally, a manhunt began and troops found him three hours later, apparently asleep, with his mask hanging from a tree.
Authorities say the defector, allegedly a civilian from the North, has expressed a desire to defect.
The army acknowledged that the troops “did not comply with due procedures” and promised to strengthen border security.
And at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday, Defense Minister Suh Wook acknowledged that surveillance systems in the area were “malfunctioning and out of date.”
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Only a handful of defectors from the north directly cross the DMZ or swim across the maritime border, although the last publicly known such incident was in November, when security issues were also raised.
Instead, the vast majority of defectors travel first to neighboring China, sometimes staying there for years before heading south via third countries.
More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to the South over the decades, but the numbers plummeted to just 229 last year, after Pyongyang imposed a strict border closure to protect itself from the coronavirus that first emerged in the neighbor and ally. China key.
The incident was evidence that the South Korean military was “on the verge of collapse,” the conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper said on Wednesday.
“Is this unit the only unit that is not doing its job properly? We think not,” he added in an editorial.
