South Korea detected a wooden boat with 4 North Korean citizens who “expressed their intention to defect.” The four are expected to be questioned in the coming hours.
South Korean authorities intercepted this Tuesday a wooden ship in the waters of the Sea of Japan with four North Koreans on board, who asked to defect, the Seoul Government advanced.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) confirmed in a statement that “unusual signals were detected this Tuesday morning in waters near the Northern Limit Line in the East Sea,” the name given to the Sea of Japan by the two. . Koreas.
The Northern Limit Line serves to divide, in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, the territorial waters of the two neighbors, which are technically still at war.
The South Korean Naval Forces, with the cooperation of the coast guard, managed to intercept a “small wooden ship” that had crossed the line, in waters east of the port city of Sokcho, about 150 kilometers northeast of the capital.
Sources from the Seoul government, cited by the South Korean news agency Yonhap, indicated that there were four North Korean citizens on the ship who “expressed their intention to defect.”
All four must be interrogated. by South Korea’s military and security agency in the next few hours.
Although North Koreans rarely choose to flee to the South across land and sea borders, which are heavily militarized on both sides, some occasionally manage to do so by boat.
Defectors typically attempt to walk or swim across the rivers separating North Korea from China and from there attempt to reach a third country, usually Thailand, to seek asylum at a South Korean embassy or consulate.
However, the number of defections has dropped sharply, in part due to the North Korean regime’s tightening of border security due to the pandemic.
On the other hand, Chinese authorities have used increasingly sophisticated methods to detect the presence of North Koreans in China, who are automatically deported to North Korea.
In 2019, just over a thousand North Korean defectors arrived in the South, while in 2022 only 59 did.
In the first six months of 2023, 99 North Koreans entered South Korea, five times more than in the same period the previous year.
Source: Observadora
