South Korea’s military is facing criticism for security breaches along the country’s heavily armed border with North Korea, after a man managed to cross south, despite having been spotted several times by surveillance cameras.
The man, wearing neoprene clothing and fins, was reportedly swam to South Korea in the early hours of February 16, but escaped capture for more than six hours, according to the Yonhap news agency.
After reaching the South Korean coast by the East Sea, he would have crawled through a drainage tunnel into the demilitarized zone (DMZ), hid his wetsuit and fins and walked, undetected, along a road by fence 5 km.
He was arrested after a guard spotted him through a CCTV camera and alerted his superiors.
By the time the manhunt started, the man had been caught five times by coastal surveillance cameras. They set off alarms twice, but the soldiers did not notice the warnings and did nothing. He managed to continue his journey after three fence cameras near a front-line military post failed to raise an alarm.
“The military in charge of the guard service did not follow proper procedures and did not detect the unidentified man,” said an official on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [JCS] said Yonhap.
An investigation into the incident found that a guard in charge of coastal surveillance equipment was handling a computer problem and considered the alarms to be technical errors, while a second guard at the military post was distracted by a phone call.
The military’s embarrassment increased when they found out that they didn’t even know about the drainage tunnel the fugitive went through during his escape from North Korea.
The man, who would have said he wants to desert, made the dangerous journey into the depths of winter, raising questions about how he survived so long in icy waters. JCS said he wore a padded jacket inside his wetsuit, adding that the tides would have worked in his favor.
The authorities refused to give his name, describing him only as a fisherman in his 20s. Reports say he may be trying to surrender to South Korean civilians, fearing that border guards will immediately force him to return to the North.
South Korea’s military was already facing criticism for security breaches after a North Korean civilian avoided being captured for hours after crossing barbed wire fences last November.
He was apprehended after surveillance equipment located him near the city of Goseong, on the east end of the DMZ, a 248 km (155 mile) strip of land that has separated the two Koreas since the late 1950-53. war.
In 2019, four North Koreans crossed the sea border undetected on a wooden boat before reaching a port on the east coast of South Korea.
Only a handful of the 31,000 North Koreans who defected to the South did so through the highly protected DMZ. The vast majority flee across North Korea’s long border with China and reach the South via a third country, usually Thailand.