A US soldier ran to North Korea on Tuesday. Now he is believed to be a prisoner of the North Korean authorities.
The American soldier who ran to North Korea on Tuesday is believed to be in the custody of the North Korean authorities.
– We believe that he is currently in the custody of North Korea and we are working to find out the case, said the spokesperson of the US forces in South Korea.
Soldier by Travis King is said to have been on a tourist tour in the demilitarized buffer zone when he suddenly took off running towards North Korea. According to the witness, he was laughing before he ran.
The eyewitness says that he thought the soldier was doing some kind of stunt to be videoed on TikTok, for example, by running towards the North Korean border.
– Then I heard one soldier shout: Grab that guy, said an eyewitness to the AP news agency.
Private King specializes in intelligence, he says BBC. He was being escorted out of South Korea back to the United States for disciplinary reasons, US officials said on Tuesday. However, he managed to sneak out of the airport and went with a tourist group to the border area between Koreas.
The soldier was constantly dealing with the authorities
Most of the inter-Korean border is heavily fortified. The soldier crossed the border at Panmunjom, also known as the Joint Security Area (JSA). There, the border is marked only by a low concrete wall, and it is relatively easy to cross, even though there are soldiers on both sides.
According to the police and the media, King had repeatedly had to deal with the authorities in South Korea. He had just been released from a South Korean prison where he was held as a suspect for abuse, a South Korean official source told news agency AFP.
King’s mother said she was shocked to learn that her son had defected to a communist, nuclear-armed country that has no formal diplomatic relations with its arch-enemy, the United States.
– I can’t imagine Travis doing something like that, the soldier’s mother told ABC News. He added that he had last heard from Travis a few days earlier when he said he was returning to his base at Fort Bliss in the United States.
Americans have been arrested before
North Korea has a long history of detaining Americans and using them as bargaining chips in bilateral relations.
– The North can assess that it can take advantage of the situation when negotiating with Washington amid tensions, said a South Korean national security official Choi Gi-il.
According to Choi, it is likely that North Korea will deal with the case of Private King for a long time.
– The North is unlikely to take immediate action to see how the US reacts, said Choi.
One of the latest US citizens to be detained by North Korea is a student Otto Warmbier. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for trying to steal a propaganda sign.
He was held captive for a year and a half and his brain was severely damaged during his imprisonment. Warmbier died six days after his release in the United States.
In the summer of 2017, the United States banned its citizens from traveling to North Korea. The decision has been extended at least until August of this year.
North Korea has not opened to tourists since it closed its borders at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic