[Guns N' Coffee]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-sol...h-korea-report

The UN Command now believes he’s in custody in the country.
An American national serving in the U.S. military defected to North Korea on Tuesday.

The U.S. Army told The Daily Beast that a service member “willfully” slipped away from an organized tour group and crossed into the Hermit Kingdom. It is the first U.S. defection to the communist regime since the 1960s.

The United Nations Command, a force which operates in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and Joint Security Area (JSA) dividing the Korean Peninsula, initially tweeted that a U.S. national had crossed the border.

“A U.S. Service member on a JSA orientation tour willfully and without authorization crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” Col. Isaac Taylor of the United States Forces Korea confirmed to The Daily Beast in a statement. “We believe he is currently in DPRK custody and are working with our KPA counterparts to resolve this incident.”

According to South Korea’s Dong-a Ilbo newspaper, the man is a private in the U.S. Army. Unnamed American officials similarly told The Washington Post that the man is a U.S. Army soldier. One also said that the detained man was recently scheduled to get on a flight to the U.S. but he never boarded the plane, adding: “This was a deliberate decision on part of the service member to cross.”

U.S. officials who spoke to CBS confirmed that the soldier had been set to fly back to the U.S. after being detained in South Korea over disciplinary issues, adding that he passed through airport security before escaping and joining the border tour.

The United States is now reportedly trying to establish his whereabouts and condition.

According to NK News, a witness on the same tour saw one a male member of her group run across the border as they visited the JSA.

“To our right, we hear a loud HA-HA-HA and one guy from OUR GROUP that has been with us all day- runs in between two of the buildings and over to the other side!!” Mikaela Johansson of Sweden wrote. “It took everybody a second to react and grasp what had actually happened, then we were ordered into and through Freedom House and running back to our military bus.”

She reportedly added that visitors at the JSA had been asked by authorities not to share images of the incident.

The JSA, also known as the “Truce Village,” is the border village inside the DMZ where soldiers from the opposing regimes of Pyongyang and Seoul stand and face one another. It’s also the place where diplomatic negotiations take place between the north and the south.

Crossing and defections across the tightly-defended border have happened in the past, though cases involving Americans defecting to North Korea are extremely rare. Following the Korean war, a small group of U.S. servicemen are known to have crossed the DMZ in 1962. James Joseph Dresnok was the last American soldier known to still be living in North Korea until his death in 2016, which was confirmed by his family the following year.

In contrast, South Korean estimates say that over 33,000 North Koreans have defected to safety in the south since the late 1990s. The majority of those who flee Kim Jong Un’s regime typically do not do so at the dangerous DMZ, however, choosing instead to cross the eastern border into China on a circuitous multinational country which eventually ends in South Korea.

Dramatic defections from North Korea have taken place in the JSA before though. In 2017, a North Korean soldier’s daring bid for freedom was captured on film as he drove a jeep and then ran on foot through the JSA, being shot at least five times by the comrades he was leaving behind before being dragged to safety by soldiers on the southern side.

Earlier in the year, American student Otto Warmbier died after spending a year in a coma following his arrest in North Korea in 2016 for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. His death at the age of 22 came less than a week after he’d been brought back to the United States while still unresponsive.

Tuesday’s reported defection comes at a time of heightened tensions between the Washington, D.C., and Pyongyang. North Korea has conducted around 100 missile tests since the beginning of last year and last week demonstrated a launch of a powerful solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) which state media called a “strong practical warning” to the United States and other adversaries.

North Korea has similarly been angered by an April summit between President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol in which the leaders agreed that U.S. nuclear submarines would resume visits to the Korean peninsula after a decades-long hiatus. The arrival of an Ohio-class ballistic missile sub in the South Korean port city of Busan was announced by the country’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday.

The UN Command and the State Department have been contacted for comment.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — An American soldier facing military disciplinary actions fled across the heavily armed border from South Korea into North Korea, U.S. officials said Tuesday, becoming the first American detained in the North in nearly five years.

Two U.S. officials said the soldier detained was Private 2nd Class Travis King, who had just been released from a South Korean prison where he’d been held on assault charges and was facing additional military disciplinary actions in the United States.

King, who’s in his early 20s, was escorted to the airport to be returned to Fort Bliss, Texas, but instead of getting on the plane he left and joined a tour of the Korean border village of Panmunjom, where he ran across the border.

The jokes on him, ha-ha-ha

[chris]

What an idiot.

[Mr.NoCredit]

Total fucking fool. It won’t take too long before he regrets that decision. It wasn’t a good one…

[foxfantastic]

What did he think was going to happen? That North Korea was just gonna open up her legs and say, "Take me, American. Take me NOW." .

[Guns N' Coffee]

North Korea does not fuck around

[Gravy42]

Dude’s a goner

[Pyramid_Head]

He chose to go, fuck him.

[foxfantastic]

Now that I think about it, this might be nothing more than a distraction from some covert operation that might have gone wrong. According to what I've read, this isn't the first time that Americans have attempted to get into North Korea, so why are they making a big deal out of this one ?

[Guns N' Coffee]

The guy didn't think this through, he is a 23 year old Private. Whatever discipline he was facing stateside is better than any amount of time he is going to spend in North Korea, if he thought they were going to treat him like Dennis Rodman he is in for a world of hurt.

[SkinnyFella]

He's not defecting due to politics or ideology. He's just avoiding punishment for being a total racist sack of shit. They'll probably punish him harder than the US ever would have.

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