SEOUL, South Korea – A North Korean man in a wet suit and pinballs crossed the eastern maritime border with South Korea this week, military officials said on Wednesday. The south’s soldiers did not locate him until he was walking in a road south of the heavily guarded border.
The crossing was the second embarrassment to the South Korean military’s border security in recent months. In November, another North Korean man, a former gymnast, crawled across the border fence and was only caught when he was half a mile south of the border. The military later said sensors that were supposed to cause alarms alerting South Korean guards had failed due to loose bolts.
The South Korean military said the latest infiltrator from the North swam across the border on Tuesday and landed south of the 2.5-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone, or DMZ, the no-man buffer zone that separated the two Koreas after the war. . a statement Wednesday.
Officials investigated the man’s motive for crossing the border, saying he may be a North Korean duplicate. He came ashore by crawling through a drain under a barbed wire fence erected by South Korea along the border beaches to deter North Korean infiltrators.
A closed-circuit television camera at a military checkpoint first caught him walking down a southern road at 4:20 a.m. Tuesday, but only three hours later soldiers caught him for questioning. When he was captured, the man was in the so-called civilian control zone south of the DMZ, where no civilians are allowed to travel without a military permit.
“Our army has not taken appropriate action, although the man has been tracked down several times in his surveillance system since he landed,” the army said.
When someone from the North crosses the border unnoticed, it raises questions about national security in South Korea. The two Koreans have technically remained at war since the Korean conflict was halted in a ceasefire in 1950-53.
The Korean demilitarized zone is one of the worlds most heavily armed borders, guarded by high barbed wire fences, minefields, sensors and nearly two million troops on both sides.
Deviations in the DMZ are relatively rare and dangerous. In November 2017, a North Korean soldier stormed through a bullet line fired by his fellow troops to enter the South through Panmunjom, the so-called armistice village that lies across the border.
More than 33,000 people from North Korea have migrated to South Korea since a devastating famine hit the country in the 1990s. But most did so through China, which borders the North, and eventually moved to a South Korean embassy in another country.