SEOUL, South Korea – South Korean authorities confirmed on Monday that a 24-year-old man who deserted from North Korea in 2017 had secretly returned to the North, crossing one of the world’s most fortified borders during a pandemic and possibly bringing the coronavirus with him.
On Sunday, North Korea claimed that a man had crossed into the country from the South and was likely infected with the virus. South Korean officials went in search of the missing deserters, and on Monday they had focused on the 24-year-old man, identified only by his last name, Kim.
In 2017, he swam across the western border between Korea, which traces a path through a narrow strait of the sea, to defect to South Korea. On July 19, she swam back across the border to Kaesong, a city in the north, after crawling through a drain under barbed wire fences, her family said.
It was not immediately clear why the deserter had returned north. South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that South Korean police had sought out the man for questioning after a fellow North Korean defector accused him of raping her last month.
North Korea said Sunday that the man was suspected of having been infected with the vicious virus, adding that it could be the first case of the virus in the country. The reverse defection prompted North leader Kim Jong-un to order the complete closure of Kaesong, a city of 300,000 people on the border with South Korea, and to declare a “maximum” national emergency.
As of Sunday, North Korea had repeatedly said it had no Covid-19 cases. The claim was challenged by outside experts as the country shares a long land border with China, where the virus broke out late last year. The North also lacks equipment and drugs to combat an epidemic.
But South Korean officials were unable to say whether the man could have carried the coronavirus across the border.
The virus had never been tested, Yoon Tae-ho, a senior official at the southern national disease control headquarters, said Monday, and was not known to have been in contact with a coronavirus patient. South Korean health authorities have tracked two people who had frequent contact with the defector while he was in the south, and both tested negative, he said.
South Korea’s army said Monday its investigators had found a bag belonging to the abandoned deserter on Ganghwa Island, west of Seoul. They also found signs that it had crawled down a drain under the border barbed wire fences.
“We saw the specific location from which he crossed north on Ganghwa Island,” Colonel Kim Jun-rak, spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the South Korean military, said during a briefing on Monday.
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The defector’s current location is unknown. South Korean officials said he was a native of Kaesong and was apparently familiar with the terrain around the western front line, where the Han River divides North and South Korea before emptying into the Yellow Sea. In some places, the two sides are separated by more than a mile of water.
He apparently swam through the same general area where he had originally deserted. At least four other North Koreans have swum across the river’s western border to the south since 2012.
The vast majority of the 33,000 North Koreans who have fled south since the early 1990s have passed through China. But some, like Kim, have crossed the inter-Korean border, which, in addition to being fortified by layers of tall barbed wire fences, is guarded by armed sentries and minefields.
