SEOUL, South Korea – A North Korean man wearing diving suit and flippers crossed the eastern sea border with South Korea this week, military officials said on Wednesday. The southern soldiers were unable to detect him until he was coming down a road south of the heavily protected border.
The crossing marked the second embarrassing breach for the security of the South Korean military border in recent months. In November, another North Korean man, a former gymnast, crawled over the border fence and was not captured until he was eight hundred meters south of the border. The military later said that the sensors that were supposed to set off alarms that alert South Korean guards did not work properly due to loose screws.
The most recent infiltrator from the North swam across the border on Tuesday, arriving ashore south of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, the nobody’s buffer zone that separated the two Koreas after the war, said South Korean military in a statement on Wednesday.
Authorities are investigating the man’s motives for crossing the border and said he may be a deserter from the North. He landed crawling down a drain under a barbed wire fence that South Korea erected along the border beaches to stop North Korean infiltrators.
A closed-circuit television camera at a military checkpoint captured him for the first time walking along a road south at 4:20 am on Tuesday, but only three hours later the soldiers captured him for questioning. When he was captured, the man was in the so-called civilian control zone south of the DMZ, where civilians cannot travel without military authorization.
“Our military has not taken adequate measures, although the man has been detected on his surveillance system several times since he landed,” the military said.
When someone from the North crosses the land border undetected, it raises questions about national security in South Korea. The two Koreas have technically been at war since the 1950-53 Korean conflict was stopped by an armistice.
The Korean Demilitarized Zone is one of the most heavily armed borders in the world, guarded by tall barbed wire fences, minefields, sensors and almost two million soldiers on both sides.
Desertions at the DMZ are relatively rare and dangerous. In November 2017, a North Korean soldier fired amid a volley of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers to enter the south via Panmunjom, the so-called border village of truce.
More than 33,000 people in North Korea have defected to South Korea since a devastating famine hit the country in the 1990s. But most did so through China, which borders the North, and ended up going to an embassy South Korean in another country.