An American soldier crossed the heavily armed border from South Korea into North Korea, US officials said on Tuesday, July 18.
He went “willfully and without authorization,” the US military said, becoming the first American detained in the North in nearly five years at a time of heightened tensions over its nuclear program.
A U.S. soldier facing disciplinary action fled across the inter-Korean border into North Korea on Tuesday and was believed to be in North Korean custody, creating a fresh crisis for Washington in its dealings with the nuclear-armed state.
Colonel Isaac Taylor, a spokesperson for the U.S. Armed Force in Korea, said the U.S. service member was on an orientation tour of Joint Security Area between the Koreas “wilfully and without authorization crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).”
Various sources identified the person as U.S. Army Private 2nd Class Travis King.
King had just been released from a South Korean prison where he had 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.
There were no more official details about why or how the soldier crossed the border but five US officials spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of the public announcement.
The American-led UN Command overseeing the area tweeted earlier Tuesday that the detained soldier was on a tour of the Korean border village of Panmunjom.
The soldier purposefully separated himself and ran away from the rest of the group, according to a US official who was not authorized to comment. The official added that it’s “not normal” for active duty service members to go on such tours.
The soldier reportedly joined a civilian tour to the Joint Security Area, the only point of the DMZ where soldiers from North and South Korea stand face to face. South Korean Travel Planning said tours to the Joint Security Area (JSA) have recently resumed.
Mikaela Johansson of Sweden wrote that she was on the tour when one of the male guests dashed across the MDL while her group visited the Joint Security Area.
“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!!” wrote Johansson. “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.”
Bloodshed and gunfire have occasionally occurred there, but it has also been a venue for numerous talks and a popular tourist spot.
Since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with an armistice – not a peace treaty – the two countries remain technically at war, with a Demilitarized Zone running along the border.
Soldiers from both sides face off at the JSA, north of Seoul, overseen by the United Nations Command. It is also a popular tourist destination, and hundreds of visitors daily tour the area on the South Korean side.
Former US president Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Panmunjom Truce Village in 2019 and even stood on North Korean soil by stepping across the demarcation line there.
North Korea sealed its borders at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and has yet to reopen. Its security presence on its side of the border at the JSA has also been significantly scaled back.
Retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Steve Tharp, who worked in the JSA area, told Seoul-based specialist site NK News that he had no idea how the North Koreans would react to the incident as there was “so little data out there” about events like this.
“This is the first contact since Covid. We don’t know what they’re thinking,” he said.
The incident comes as relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points, with diplomacy stalled and Kim calling for increased weapons development, including tactical nuclear weapons.
Seoul and Washington have ramped up defense cooperation in response, staging joint military exercises with advanced stealth jets and US strategic assets.
On Tuesday, the allies held the first Nuclear Consultative Group meeting in Seoul and announced an American nuclear submarine was making a port visit to Busan for the first time since 1981. The move is expected to trigger a strong response from North Korea, which balks at deploying US nuclear assets around the Korean peninsula.
Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of Kim Jong Un, said on Monday such actions would only “make the DPRK go farther away” from possible talks.
Despite ongoing hostilities between the two sides, the JSA in Panmunjom is typically peaceful.
In 1976, two American soldiers were killed in the JSA by North Koreans with axes in a dispute over a tree.
The last defection at the JSA was in 2017 when a North Korean soldier drove a military jeep and ran on foot across the demarcation line at Panmunjom. His fellow North Korean soldiers shot him multiple times as they sought to prevent his escape, but after hours of surgery, he survived.
In general, defections between the two Koreas are rare but far more common in the other direction, when North Koreans seek to escape grinding poverty and repression by fleeing, typically across the northern land border into China.