The United States-led United Nations Command overseeing the area tweeted on Tuesday that the U.S. citizen was on a tour to the border village of Panmunjom and crossed into north without authorization.
An American man has been detained after crossing the heavily fortified border from South Korea into North Korea.
The United States-led United Nations Command overseeing the area tweeted on Tuesday that the U.S. citizen was on a tour to the border village of Panmunjom and crossed into north without authorization.
The command said that the man is in North Korean custody and that it is working with its North Korean counterparts to resolve the incident. It gave no further details on who the man is or why he crossed the border.
North Korea’s state media didn’t immediately report on the border incident, a report by Los Angeles Times said.
Cases of Americans or South Koreans defecting to North Korea are rare. More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to the South to avoid political repression and economic difficulties at home since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Panmunjom, which sits inside the 154-mile-long Demilitarized Zone, has been jointly overseen by the U.N. Command and North Korea since its creation at the close of the Korean War.
Bloodshed and gunfire have occasionally occurred there, but it has also been a venue for numerous talks and is a popular tourist spot.
In November 2017, North Korean soldiers fired 40 rounds as one of their colleagues raced toward freedom. The soldier was hit five times before he was found beneath a pile of leaves on the southern side of Panmunjom. He survived and is now in South Korea.
The most famous incident at Panmunjom happened in August 1976, when two U.S. Army officers were killed by ax-wielding North Korean soldiers. The officers had been sent out to trim a 40-foot tree that obstructed the view from a checkpoint.
The attack prompted Washington to fly nuclear-capable B-52 bombers toward the DMZ to intimidate North Korea.
Panmunjom also is where the armistice that ended the Korean War was signed.
That armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula in a technical state of war. The U.S. still stations about 28,000 troops in South Korea.
There have been a small number of U.S. soldiers who fled to North Korea during the Cold War, including Charles Jenkins, who deserted his Army post in South Korea in 1965 and fled across the DMZ.
He appeared in North Korean propaganda films and married a Japanese nursing student who had been abducted by North Korean agents. He died in Japan in 2017.
In recent years, some Americans have been arrested in North Korea after allegedly entering the country from China.
They were later convicted of espionage and other anti-state acts, but were often released after the U.S. sent high-profile missions to secure their freedom.
In May 2018, North Korea released three American detainees— Kim Dong Chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak Song — who returned to the U.S. on a plane with then-Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, during a short-lived period of warm relations between the longtime adversary nations. Later in 2018, North Korea said it expelled U.S. citizen Bruce Byron Lowrance.
The releases came as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was engaged in nuclear diplomacy with then-President Trump, but the high-stakes diplomacy collapsed in 2019 amid wrangling over U.S.-led sanctions on North Korea.
Some foreigners have said after their release that their declarations of guilt had been coerced while they were in North Korean custody.
Tuesday’s border crossing happened amid high tensions over North Korea’s barrage of missile tests since the start of last year.
The U.S. earlier Tuesday sent a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea for the first time in decades as deterrence against North Korea.