Category: DMZ

I wonder if this guy had an accident and fell overboard?:

A South Korean fisheries control official went missing while on duty aboard an inspection boat off the western border island of Yeonpyeong earlier this week, and authorities are looking into intelligence that he could be alive in North Korea, officials said.

The 47-year-old official affiliated with the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries disappeared from the 500-ton boat before noon Monday when it was patrolling around 10 kilometers south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border.

Colleagues only found his shoes on the vessel and reported his disappearance to the Coast Guard, prompting an intensive search operation involving about 20 vessels and aircraft.

“According to our military intelligence, he was found in North Korean waters late Tuesday, and we are looking into details,” the ministry said in a statement. “We will take necessary steps, including investigating how he went missing and checking related facts with North Korea.”

It was not immediately known if he was found alive or not, but military sources said there is a chance he is alive.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Somebody had to be held responsible for this dereliction of duty and it ended up being a ROK Marine Corps 2-Star General:

The border crossing near the western island of Ganghwa by the 24-year-old man, surnamed Kim, became known after North Korea reported Sunday that a “runaway” returned home in the border city of Kaesong with coronavirus symptoms and that the entire city was blocked off to prevent the spread of the virus.

South Korean officials said Kim had been under investigation over allegations he raped a female defector.

According to the JCS’ probe results, Kim was caught on the military’s surveillance equipment seven times — five on its monitoring cameras, twice on thermal observation devices (TODs) — including his arrival in the North, but troops failed to identify him as a person trying to cross the border.

The defector passed through a drainage tunnel running underneath barbed wire fences to evade South Korean border guards before reaching the shore and swimming a few kilometers to North Korea. 

The fences set up inside the drainage tunnel were in poor condition, allowing the defector to pass through them easily, they said. It took just around 10 minutes for Kim to pass through the channel and reach the river separating the two Koreas.

The JCS will seek disciplinary measures against those accountable, including the dismissal of Maj. Gen. Baek Gyeong-sun as commander of the Marine Corps’ 2nd Division in charge of border security at the area, officials said. 

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I doubt anyone who follows inter-Korean issues ever expected this to last very long:

North Korea appears to have dispatched soldiers to some empty guard posts inside the Demilitarized Zone, sources said Thursday, following its warnings that it would beef up its military presence in border areas.

On Wednesday, the General Staff of the (North) Korean People’s Army vowed to set up “civil police posts,” which had been withdrawn from the DMZ under an inter-Korean military agreement, as part of next steps against South Korea after the demolition of the inter-Korean liaison office in the border town of Kaesong.

According to the military sources, several soldiers were spotted being dispatched to empty sentry posts inside the buffer zone from late Wednesday. 

North Korea is believed to have around 150 such posts, and some of them were vacated in accordance with the inter-Korean tension-reducing pact signed in Sept. 19, 2018.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.