Man who sneaked into North Korea thought to have previously defected to South

Seoul says footage shows person 'with identical look and dress' to man who crossed in opposite direction in 2020

Military guard posts on the border of North and South Korea on January 2. A person who crossed the border into North Korea on New Year’s Day was likely a defector who had slipped through in the otherShow more

The man who crossed the heavily fortified border between the two Koreas on Saturday in a rare defection is believed to have previously defected to the South in 2020 in the same area, Seoul's Defence Ministry said on Monday.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said it carried out a search operation after spotting the man on Saturday on the eastern side of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) separating the two countries.

“The authorities presume the person is a North Korean defector and are in the process of verifying related facts,” the Ministry of National Defence said on Monday.

A ministry official later told reporters the man, who is his 30s, is believed to have come to the South in November 2020.

“Footage showed he had an identical look and dress as the person who defected from the North in 2020,” the official said.

Investigators are seeking to determine whether weekend movement detected on the northern side of the border was triggered by North Korean troops coming to escort the man.

The South Korean government does not think it is a case of espionage at this time, the official said.

South Korean media have reported that the man had experience as a gymnast, which helped him to scale the fences. However, the ministry official said they could not confirm that.

The official said North Korea has acknowledged the South's messages on inter-Korean hotlines about the incident but has not provided any more details about the man's fate.

The border crossing, which is illegal in South Korea, came as North Korea carries out strict anti-coronavirus measures since shutting borders in early 2020, although it has not confirmed any infections.

In September 2020, Pyongyang apologised after its troops shot dead a South Korean fisheries official who went missing at sea and burnt his remains, in what it said were anti-pandemic precautions.

Two months earlier, North Korea had declared a national emergency and sealed off a border town after a North Korean defector with reported Covid-19 symptoms illegally crossed back from the South.

Cross-border relations soured after denuclearisation negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington stalled since a failed summit in 2019.

South Korea and a US-led UN force are technically still at war with North Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

While thousands of North Koreans have settled in the South, crossings of the DMZ are rare, with most defectors making their way through China.

Defections from South to North across the DMZ are rarer still, with only a handful recorded in recent years.

In Saturday's case, the man's presence near the border went unnoticed for about three hours despite CCTV cameras recording him scaling a fence and tripping alarms, the military said in a briefing on Sunday.

South Korean troops launched a search operation after spotting the man at 9.20pm but could not stop him from crossing into the North at about 10.40pm.

In June, South Korea announced it would fast-track the acquisition of a rail-mounted robot and the use of an artificial intelligence-enabled video and audio system to boost security along the border.