Tuesday, 27 October 2009
A South Korean citizen fled to communist North Korea through heavily armed border posts, fulfilling his long-standing dream, Korean media reported on Tuesday.
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was quoted by the Yonhap news agency as saying the 30-year-old man, identified as Kang Dong-lim, might have defected through barbed wires at the border, which were discovered cut open.
The news agency quoted the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) as saying Kang earlier made several attempts to defect, owing to his longing for the northern half of Korea, but in vain. Now the man is "under the warm care of a relevant organ" in North Korea, and "is pleased with the accomplishment of his desire for defection,"
the KCNA said.
According to KCNA, Kang crossed the eastern side of the Demilitarized Zone on Monday.
Yonhap said Kang raised pigs on a farm in South Korea's southwest after quitting his job at a Samsung-affiliated semiconductor company.
The reported incident is one of rare cases when people defect from South Korea to its northern neighbor. Usually, citizens of the communist North defect to the capitalist South. In early October, 11 people, including two children, were reported to have defected to South Korea on a fishing boat. Media reports said they had asked South Korean authorities for political asylum.
In 2007, a 45-year-old South Korean man made it into the communist neighbor through the border between North Korea and China, but was expelled for reasons yet to be identified, Yonhap said.
According to official statistics, 2,809 North Korean citizens left the country for South Korea in 2008, and 16,947 people have fled to the south since the end of the Korean War in the early 1950s, mostly through China.
North Korean citizens also defect to Japan. There is no official data on the number of refugees, but, according to Japanese media, it exceeds 100.
