South Korea’s army is being criticized for security attacks along the country’s heavily armed border with North Korea after a man was able to cross into the South despite being spotted several times by surveillance cameras.
According to the news agency Yonhap, the man, with a diving suit and a pinball, swam to South Korea in the early hours of the morning, but he caught more than six hours.
After arriving on the South Korean coast via the Baltic Sea, he apparently crawled through a drainage tunnel in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), hid his diving suit and flippers and walked about 5 km along the road.
He was arrested after a guard spotted him via a CCTV camera and warned his superiors.
By the time the hunt began, the man had been picked up five times by the Coast Guard cameras. They twice sounded the alarm, but soldiers did not heed the warnings and took no action. He was able to continue his journey after three fencing cameras near a military position at the front did not cause an alarm.
“Service officers supervising the duty of care did not follow the necessary procedures and did not locate the unidentified man,” an official of the joint chiefs of staff remarked. [JCS] said Yonhap.
An investigation into the incident found that a warden overseeing equipment on the coast addressed a computer problem and dismissed the alarms as technical errors, while a second guard at the military post was distracted by a phone call .
The embarrassment of the army was exacerbated when it turned out that he did not even know about the drainage tunnel that the escapee went through during his flight from North Korea.
The man, who allegedly said he wanted to defect, undertook the dangerous journey into the depths of winter, raising questions about how he had survived so long in icy waters. The JCS said he wore a quilted jacket in his wetsuit, adding that the tides would have worked in his favor.
Officials refused to give his name, describing him only as a fishing worker in his twenties. According to reports, he may have tried to surrender to South Korean citizens, fearing that border guards would immediately force him to return to the North.
South Korea’s military has already been criticized for security breaches after a North Korean citizen eluded for hours after crossing barbed wire fences last year.
He was arrested after surveillance equipment spotted him near the city of Goseong at the eastern tip of the DMZ, a 248 km (155 miles) strip of land littered with mines that have separated the two Koreas since the end of their 1950-53 . war.
In 2019, four North Koreans crossed the maritime border unnoticed in a wooden boat before arriving at a port on the east coast of South Korea.
Only a handful of the 31,000 North Koreans who crossed into the South did so via the heavily guarded DMZ. The vast majority escape via North Korea’s long border with China and arrive in the South via a third country, often Thailand.