North Korean defector spends six hours walking around heavily guarded border unnoticed

South Korea’s military is facing criticism over security lapses along the country’s heavily armed border with North Korea after a man was able to cross into the South despite being spotted multiple times by surveillance cameras.

The man, wearing a wetsuit and flippers, reportedly swam to South Korea in the early hours of 16 February, but evaded capture for more than six hours, according to the Yonhap news agency.

After arriving on the South Korean coast via the East Sea, he reportedly crawled through a drainage tunnel inside the demilitarised zone (DMZ), hid his wetsuit and flippers and walked, undetected, along a road for about 5km.

He was apprehended after a guard spotted him via a CCTV camera and alerted his superiors.

North Korean envoy defects in possible sign that Kim’s power base is ‘drifting’

Read more

By the time the manhunt began, the man had been picked up five times by coastal surveillance cameras. They twice triggered alarms, but soldiers failed to notice the warnings and took no action. He was able to continue his journey after three fence cameras near a frontline military post failed to trigger an alarm.

“Service members in charge of the guard duty failed to abide by due procedures and failed to detect the unidentified man,” an official from the joint chiefs of staff [JCS] told Yonhap.

An investigation into the incident found that a guard in charge of coastal surveillance equipment was addressing a computer issue and dismissed the alarms as technical errors, while a second guard at the military post had been distracted by a phone call.

The military’s embarrassment was compounded when it emerged that it had not even known about the drainage tunnel the escapee passed through during his flight from North Korea.

The man, who has reportedly said he wants to defect, made the perilous journey in the depths of winter, raising questions about how he survived for so long in freezing waters. The JCS said he had worn a padded jacket inside his wetsuit, adding that the tides would have worked in his favour.

Officials refused to give his name, describing him only as a fisheries worker in his 20s. Reports said he may have been attempting to hand himself in to South Korean civilians, fearing that border guards would immediately force him to return to the North.

South Korea’s military was already facing criticism over security breaches after a North Korean civilian evaded capture for hours after crossing barbed wire fences last November.

He was apprehended after surveillance equipment spotted him near the town of Goseong at the eastern end of the DMZ, a 248km-long (155-mile) strip of land strewn with mines that has separated the two Koreas since the end of their 1950-53 war.

In 2019, four North Koreans crossed the maritime border undetected in a wooden boat before arriving at a port on South Korea’s east coast.

Only a handful of the 31,000 North Koreans who have defected to 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.