“I can confirm that one of our soldiers voluntarily crossed the border into North Korea and is now in the custody of the Pyongyang authorities while on tour.” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this at a press conference at the Pentagon.
The story
A US serviceman was arrested by North Korea for crossing the border into the Demilitarized Zone that has split the peninsula in two since the 1950s, that far from weapon-free no man’s land described by then US President Bill Clinton as ” scariest place in the world.” In all probability it is a case of desertion, certainly an episode destined to further exacerbate Washington’s relations with Pyongyang and its closest ally, China. “A US citizen on an orientation tour of the Joint Security Area crossed the military demarcation line into North Korea without authorization,” the United Nations Command stationed in the area since 1953 announced in the morning in a terse statement. , ensuring they are in contact with their Korean counterparts to negotiate the release.
A few hours pass and sources from the State Department and the Pentagon report to the media that the arrested person is a soldier, a simple soldier, named Travis King, but many questions remain, from whether or not the gesture was voluntary to the motivations. According to an official, King “crossed the border voluntarily”, thesis also corroborated by a witness who said he saw him “running along the North Korean border smiling”.
According to other officials, the soldier was about to be kicked out of South Korea for disciplinary reasons but managed to leave the airport after security checks, join a sightseeing tour in the area and then proceed to North Korea. The incident took place in Panmunjon, a village about 100 kilometers from Seoul that is also open to tourists who can visit the Joint Security Area from there and even stop for a few minutes in North Korea, under the menacing gaze of the Pyongyang military. Visitors are escorted through the area by South Korean and American soldiers, can visit the ‘Bridge of No Return’ – where Korean prisoner of war exchanges took place in 1953 – and the monument to a Seoul soldier killed in a firefight triggered by the defection of a Soviet citizen in 1984. In the village, no wall or fence separates the two Koreas, just a 15 cm high concrete wall.
On the other hand, it is absolutely forbidden to cross the border unless it is a historic occasion such as the meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in 2019. The soldier is the first American arrested by Pyongyang since 2018, when Bruce Byron Lowrance was jailed for a month for entering the country illegally from China. In 2016, however, the American student Otto F. Warmbier was arrested in the North Korean capital on charges of having attempted to tear down a propaganda poster from the wall of his hotel. The 20-year-old was sentenced to 15 years in prison, was repatriated to the United States in a coma after 17 months, and died at his home in Ohio a week later.