North Korea has remained silent about a United States soldier’s highly unusual entry into its territory when he crossed the heavily-fortified border between South and North Korea.
Regarding the whereabouts of US Private 2nd Class Travis King, who voluntarily escaped into North Korea on Tuesday while on a tour of the border hamlet of Panmunjom, there has been no word from North Korea.
The event was not covered by North Korea’s state media on Wednesday, and the nation’s representative to the UN in New York did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Later on Tuesday, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin revealed that an active US service member had knowingly crossed the border into North Korea without permission.
‘We are very early in this event, and so there’s a lot that we are still trying to learn but what we do know is that one of our service members who was on a tour wilfully and without authorisation crossed the military demarcation line,’ Austin told a press briefing.
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‘We are closely monitoring and investigating the situation and working to notify the soldier’s next of kin and engaging to address this incident,’ he said.
Africa Today News, New York reports that North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles towards its eastern sea on Wednesday morning but the latest sabre rattling was not considered to be related to the US soldier crossing the borders.
Analysts said the missile launch was more likely related to the arrival of a US nuclear-armed submarine in the country’s port city of Busan on Tuesday – the first such visit by a submarine equipped with nuclear weapons since the early 1980s.
‘It’s likely that North Korea will use the soldier for propaganda purposes in the short term and then as a bargaining chip in the mid-to-long term,’ said Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in South Korea.
King, 23, was a cavalry scout with the 1st Armoured Division who had served nearly two months in a South Korean prison for assault, according to reports.
He was released on July 10 and was being sent home on Monday to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he could have faced additional military discipline and discharge from the service. He was escorted as far as customs but left an airport in South Korea before having to board his plane to the US. It was not clear how he spent the hours until joining the Panmunjom tour and running across the border to North Korea on Tuesday afternoon.