American Soldier in North Korea Custody ‘Willfully’ Crossed the Border: Pentagon
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that it was a U.S. soldier who crossed the border into North Korea, saying the individual willfully did so.
Earlier Tuesday, the U.S.-led U.N. Command overseeing the demilitarized zone confirmed that the U.S. citizen was on tour around the Korean border village of Panmunjom before the person crossed the border into North Korea without proper authorization. It did not specify whether the individual was a soldier or not, while Pyongyang has not issued a public response.
“We’re very early in this event, and so there’s a lot that we’re still trying to learn, but what we do know is that one of our service members who was on a tour willfully and without authorization crossed the military demarcation line,” Mr. Austin told reporters in Washington.
U.S. officials are “closely monitoring and investigating the situation, and working to notify the soldier’s next of kin and engaging to address this incident,” Mr. Austin added, saying the soldier is believed to be in North Korean custody. “I’m absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop. And so we will remain focused on this,” he added.
Details about the soldier, including their hometown and what additional charges they faced, were not immediately available. It was also unclear how the soldier managed to leave the airport while he was being escorted.
Some military officials told Fox News later on Tuesday that the soldier was identified as Private 2nd Class Travis King, who had spent two months in a South Korean detention facility after a physical altercation. Mr. King, officials said, made comments to facility staff that he didn’t want to come back to the United States after he was released from custody.
Pentagon officials have not publicly commented on the allegations that Mr. King was the soldier who entered the border. The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Defense for comment Tuesday.
“A U.S. National on a JSA orientation tour crossed, without authorization, the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). We believe he is currently in DPRK custody and are working with our KPA counterparts to resolve this incident,” the U.N. Command said in a Twitter post in confirming the incident on Tuesday.
Cases of Americans or South Koreans defecting to North Korea are rare, though more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea to avoid political oppression and economic difficulties since the end of the 1950–53 Korean War.
Panmunjom, located inside the 154-mile-long Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), has been jointly overseen by the U.N. Command and North Korea since its creation at the close of the Korean War. Bloodshed and gunfire have occasionally occurred there, but it has also been a venue for numerous talks and is a popular tourist spot.
A witness who was on the tour told CBS News that they had just visited one of the buildings when a “man gives out a loud ‘ha ha ha,’ and just runs in between some building.” The witness said the organizers of the tour didn’t immediately react and appeared to be confused.
“I thought it was a bad joke at first, but when he didn’t come back, I realized it wasn’t a joke, and then everybody reacted and things got crazy,” the unnamed person said. “It was on the way back in the bus, and we got to one of the checkpoints … someone said we were 43 going in and 42 coming back,” that person said.
Known for its blue huts straddling concrete slabs that form the demarcation line, Panmunjom draws visitors from both sides who want to see the Cold War’s last frontier. No civilians live at Panmunjom. In the past, North and South Korean soldiers faced off within meters of each other.
Tours to the southern side of the village reportedly drew around 100,000 visitors a year before the coronavirus pandemic, when South Korea restricted gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19. The tours resumed fully last year. During a short-lived period of inter-Korean engagement in 2018, Panmunjom was one of the border sites that underwent mine-clearing operations by North and South Korean army engineers as the Koreas vowed to turn the village into a “peace zone” where tourists from both sides could move around with more freedom.
There have been a small number of U.S. soldiers who went to North Korea during the Cold War, including Charles Jenkins, who deserted his army post in South Korea in 1965 and fled across the DMZ. He appeared in North Korean propaganda films and married a Japanese nursing student who had been abducted from Japan by North Korean agents. He died in Japan in 2017.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
