A North Korean soldier escaped to the South on Thursday across the heavily-guarded Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula, triggering gunfire on both sides of the tense border in the second defection in successive months.
The “low-ranking” soldier was spotted by South Korean soldiers using surveillance equipment as he crossed the land border near Yeoncheon in thick fog and made his way to a guard post, a spokesman for Seoul’s defence ministry said.
There were no shots at the time, he said, but about 80 minutes later South Korean troops fired around 20 rounds from a K-3 machine gun to warn off Northern guards who approached the border apparently looking for their comrade.
Two bursts of gunfire were later heard in the North, the spokesman said, but there were no indications of any bullets crossing the border.
The incident came a month after a rare and dramatic defection by a Northern soldier under a hail of bullets from his own side at Panmunjom, the truce village where opposing forces confront each other across a concrete dividing line.
On that occasion, the defector drove to the heavily-guarded border at speed and ran across the border as North Korean troops fired at him. He was hit at least four times.
Footage showed the badly injured man being pulled to safety by two South Korean soldiers who crawled to reach him just south of the demarcation line.
He has since been recovering in hospital in the South.
Yeoncheon, where Thursday’s defection happened, is in the midwestern part of the DMZ, in Gyeonggi province.
Away from Panmunjom, the rest of the 4-kilometre-wide DMZ bristles with barbed wire and is littered with minefields, making any crossing extremely hazardous.
The latest defection was the fourth by a soldier across the DMZ this year.
But Kim Dong-Yub, defence analyst at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, said the sample size was too small to draw conclusions about a trend.
